Our Work On The Obama Transition Pays Off.

In the interests of maintaining the spirit of transparency set forth by the Obama/Biden Administration we are providing this account of our recent development activities within the online activities of the Obama/Biden Transition Team and the subsequent Executive Branch Officials.

For more than three months “The Committe” has been deeply emerged in the Obama/ Biden Presidential Campaign.  “The Committee” is our group handle for the 23 volunteers who make up the Political Sphere of Influence Group on the NeoAdvertising Platform development team. They dug through fund-raising junk mail and Facebook group posts to identify the key Transition team appointees under John Podesta. Monitoring chat rooms and political blogs “The Committee” was able to determine the plans for a massive web portal to be launched the day after the Election results were finalized.

We found our way onto the production site and discovered that several forums were planned for public discourse on the Administration’s  massive  portal site to be launched on change.gov. One of the members of  “The Committee” had interviewed an IT manager job candidate who wound up on the transition team. Another person had a sister whose husband was high up in the planning structure. We had our network of moles on the inside, feeding us day-to-day info on site architecture, traffic stats, infrastructure issues and content decisions.

This lead us to the development of an innovative “Trojan Horse” Strategy. IAPIA would propose that the Obama/Biden Administration institute a White House Office of Creative Affairs(OCA). A section of the change.gov site was to be dedicated to Proposals for the Obama/Biden Transition Team. Our OCA Proposal would provide us with the perfect cover to mine the change.gov site for “America’s Ideas. And it would be these cherry-picked ideas from all over the nation–the best of our best–that would make up the content of our prototype front-end to the proposed OCA.

Our concept was simple. America would post it’s ideas for solving the problems expressed in the Obama/Biden Agenda. And members of all the creative communities that serve Corporate America would contribute their genius and their expertise to improve , refine and bring these ideas down the line to fruition. The end product could be adopted by anyone with the capital to make a go of the final business model. As long as the business was located in or employed workers from an area designated as an area for Economic Development by the Obama/Biden Administration.

This allowed the Committee to post a notice as a comment on each selected idea to the author of the idea that their suggestion had been selected by IAPIA to be included as one of the Top 20 Ideas of the Day, to be included in the proposed White House Office of Creative Affairs beta test site. Of course a link to the site was included. The notice was done in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Policies posted by change.gov. We had found a loophole that allowed us to use a NeoAdvertising technique to connect to the change.gov audience for three months. What we learned from members of that audience allowed us to understand that the interest was in the incubation process, not the politics behind it.

From that point we made our proposal to the White House, but our focus shifted back to an open source development platform that would stick with solutions developed to follow the Obama/Biden Administration Agenda guide lines but without the political baggage the direct association with the White House affiliation brings to the party.  Besides, the transition team had adapted key elements of our proposal for their White House Office Of Public Liaison and their Citizen’s Briefing Book. We were not in competition with the incoming administration here…we were and are in support of their agenda. So it made all the sense in the world to “privatize” the IAPIA proposed White House Office of Creative Affairs even as we continued our proposals to White House Staff.

Since we had created a promotional theme for OCA under the banner, “ThinkHardAmerica” we were able to shift our strategy, learning curve and user research into developing ThinkHardAmerica.com The initial 6o day alph phase is currently in progress. We invite you to participate. We will begin NeoAdvertising Sponsorship Trials on March 1, 2009.

~ by The Committee on January 31, 2009.