Things are new in Washington—not just the administration, but the notion that in a financial crisis, government is going to have to be held accountable more than ever for what it does and how it spends its money.
Across Washington and the country, government entities have long known that they need to document what they’re doing with video, for B-rolls, Web pages and more.
At the last presidential transition, most every government agency had a Web site, and a pretty good one by 2001 standards. In 2009, nearly every site has video archives and streams its meetings and events, giving ordinary citizens unprecedented access to what their employees in government are doing.
The Obama people have promised greater
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SANJAY TALWANI
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government transparency, and that’s a good start. They also tout a fresh, future-looking, tech-savvy energy, a new sense that we need to use technological advances to help tackle the country’s problems. And with video, we can do more with less while advancing technology to help create future wealth.
Ubiquitous broadband, greater use of spectrum—under the new regime of Hope and Change, these must be more than just nice ideas, but economic initiatives all their own. These are the kind of advances the country can’t afford not to make.
By 2013, the economy may or may not be back to where it was before September 2008. But we can almost guarantee that the use of video will be far more widespread, and that government agencies will find more and more creative ways to use technology to fulfill their missions and tell the public all about it.
Even in tough times, the technologically innovative as well as the creative move forward. In fact, in tough times, it may be only the best innovators that succeed. Companies with plenty of credit and hype but inferior ideas have had a great run the last couple of decades and even made many people rich. But nowadays, the fakers will fade fast.
GOVERNMENT VIDEO too is going through change with the moving on of longtime Editor Mark Pescatore, who made clear for nine years the importance of video in the public service. Like the rest of the country, we’ll take the best of the old and hunt for the new in our own mission to help government video professionals do their jobs and will take fresh steps to highlight exemplary uses of technology by government agencies.
So, be sure and continue to let us know when your own agency has something to shout about— because there’s more happening than we can possible find on our own, and the public will never know what they’re paying for unless the government talks about it.
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