A new era has begun
Yesterday was the inauguration of President Barack Obama, our next President of the United States. Its so refreshing say that! I'm thrilled to see change in our government with progressive ideas. While I'm interested in seeing the important issues that plague our nation get resolved, I'm also interested to see how our new President will utilize information technology, specifically the use of open source. Throughout his campaign, it was known that he uses several open source technologies such as Apache and PHP for his main website and as well as change.gov. Its refreshing to know that he's keen on realizing how important technology is on improving the nation. His first step was updating and improving the whitehouse.gov website by including a blog and several RSS feeds. While a minor detail, I think it'll become very important in the years to come for his administration.
The grass roots campaign he ran was incredible and proved that the power of a community of people is powerful. The nature of his campaign acted almost like an open source project in the sense that it was a group of volunteers that had a very specific goal. CNN even noticed that correlation on election night by mentioning The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an essay describing the open source theology.
I can't wait to see if Obama will do anything that would help promote and support open source in government and beyond. I'm very interested obviously because that's what I do with my job, but I also feel that its important to help save tax payers money. I'd be ecstatic if his administration noticed what we're doing here at the OSL and would help us out, but that's a pretty far fetched dream. I have a feeling that he has far more important tasks to worry about, but one can dream.
Congrats President Barack Obama, you've proved to all of us that with determination and planning, anything is possible!
