WhiteHouse.gov overwhelmed by challenges

WASHINGTON - The team that ran the most technologically advanced presidential campaign in modern history is finding it difficult to adapt that model to government.

WhiteHouse.gov, envisioned as the primary vehicle for President Obama to communicate with the online masses, has been overwhelmed by challenges that staffers did not foresee and technological problems they have yet to solve.

Obama, for example, would like to send out mass e-mail updates on presidential initiatives, but the White House does not have the technology in place to do so. The same goes for text messaging, another campaign staple.

Beyond the technological upgrades needed to enable text broadcasts, there are security and privacy rules to sort out involving the collection of cell phone numbers, according to Obama aides, who acknowledge being caught off guard by the strictures of government bureaucracy.

"This is uncharted territory," said Macon Phillips, White House director of new media, which was a midlevel position in previous administrations but has been boosted by Obama to a "special assistant to the president."

Phillips, 30, a self-described geek who worked at an online consulting company before joining the campaign, has been trying to manage high expectations that the Obama administration will run the most accessible, transparent, Web-savvy government in history. He feels the weight of carrying out that bold ambition - and hears the criticism.

Hours before the $787 billion stimulus package cleared Congress, Obama's online team posted the legislation on WhiteHouse.gov. The team recognized that many Americans would not only want to read the bill, which runs 1,071 pages, but would also want to comment on it. On the site, however, users were asked to limit their "comments, thoughts and ideas" to 500 characters, a restriction that did not go over well.

"Absurd," responded Ellen Miller of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, which calls for more government transparency and interactivity online.

Within 36 hours, Phillips and his team had reacted to public disappointment and raised the character count from 500 to 5,000. "It's an improvement," said Phillips, who called for patience.

He noted that WhiteHouse. gov had a blog and a YouTube channel, both firsts for a president. Also, Katie Jacobs Stanton, a Silicon Valley executive who helped start Google Finance, recently joined the team as director of citizen participation.

The online unit, which numbers at least seven, is larger than any White House has had but is not configured to replicate the campaign's work.

Phillips said: "We're not running a campaign anymore. . . . The new programs that we will roll out are more than just URLs. They are new ways to engage with citizens. Stay tuned."

Wherever this experiment leads, what's certain is that, in the same way Franklin D. Roosevelt harnessed the power of radio and John F. Kennedy leveraged the reach of television to directly communicate with the public, the BlackBerry-carrying Obama wants to use the Internet to redefine the relationship between the presidency and the people.

As Phillips and his team are discovering, Obama is being held accountable for everything he is posting (and not posting) on his site. On his first full day as president, he issued a memo on WhiteHouse.gov saying the administration's yet-unnamed chief technology officer would be charged with writing an "open government" directive that will outline how government agencies and departments will be more transparent and collaborative.

Working with the heads of the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration, the technology chief has 120 days to come up with the directive.