Mike Webb of ProPublica says, "I thought you guys might be curious about the changes to Obama's Change.gov website which was supposed to describe how the president-elect would use technology to involve more people in government. They shut it down over the weekend, so we flagged it in a post (since then they responded that they're "retooling" the site)."
Snip from the ProPublica post:
We noted Friday that President-elect Barack Obama's transition Web site, Change.gov, included pages describing how he will use technology to increase public participation in government and provide more information to the public.
But sometime over the weekend, those pages went away. All that remains on the Agenda portion of the transition team's site is a two-paragraph overview of what the agenda will include:
President-Elect Obama and Vice President-Elect Biden have developed innovative approaches to challenge the status quo in Washington and to bring about the kind of change America needs.
The principal priorities of the Obama Administration include: a plan to revive the economy, to fix our health care, education, and social security systems, to define a clear path to energy independence, to end the war in Iraq responsibly and finish our mission in Afghanistan, and to work with our allies to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, among many other domestic and foreign policy objectives.
If you go directly to the two pages we linked to last week, you get the message: "Not Found: The page you requested is not available right now." (Here are cached versions of the pages.)
Also now gone are pages outlining how the new administration plans to revitalize the economy, end the war in Iraq and provide healthcare to all.
Snapshots of some of the pages are on the site whitehouse2.org.
Obama's 'Agenda' Disappears From Change.gov. Here's the campaign's response today. UPDATE: A few folks asked what I thought, and here's what I think: As noted in the previous BB post, the speed with which the website was launched was pretty impressive. Obama and his team may been taken over by space aliens or Dick Cheney laser mind control rays — anything's possible. But I doubt that. And given how hard they've worked and how little time they've had since winning the election to pull together a transition plan, I am impressed that anything was published at all. I'm inclined to give them some room to get their act together. If backsliding follows, I'll be the among the first to blog about that, too.
Previously on Boing Boing: Change.gov
