Barack Obama recrute actuellement pour son administration et parmi ses collaborateurs plusieurs viennent de chez Google dans des positions qui rappellent quelques unes des caractéristiques les plus intéressantes de cette entreprise et de son modèle de management.

Voici d'après Mary Anne Ostrom de Mercury's News (Obama's Bay Area brain trust draws from Google, Stanford, UC Berkeley) quelques uns de ces heureux élus :

Sonal Shah

The White House hasn't made it official, but Google.org's Shah has e-mailed her work colleagues that she's headed to the White House as director of social innovation and civic engagement. Easiest translation for her title: social-networking maven. Obama has often promised to make the inner workings of government, and his own White House, more transparent and interactive. Shah will be part of a team, including a chief information officer and still-to-be-named chief technology officer, charged with figuring out how to integrate Web 2.0 tools into a government digital network historically hobbled by massive bureaucracy. (Cisco Systems CTO Padmasree Warrior continues to be mentioned as a top candidate for the White House CTO slot.) Then again, Shah has not shied away from tough assignments, including working on debt relief issues in Africa and rebuilding the banking system in Kosovo and Bosnia. "Tweets" from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. could be coming soon.

Katie Jacobs Stanton

Stanton started work earlier this month as the nation's first ever director of citizen participation. Somehow that's different from "civic engagement" (see Sonal Shah), though the White House hasn't clarified how. A Google employee, Stanton worked on the company's Open Social Initiative and the "Moderator," a Web tool that let average Americans ask questions during the presidential debates. According to the White House Web site, citizen participation will be a priority for the administration, especially as it tries to replicate the digital successes of the campaign. Among the new administration's promises is to post all nonemergency legislation to its Web site for five days and allow the public to review and comment before the president signs it.

Parmi les autres élus, on retrouve des noms de gens qui partagent les mêmes valeurs, comme Tom Kalil, de Berkeley :

Google's Eric Schmidt once called Kalil "the center of the Internet revolution" when he worked for the Clinton White House. In a return engagement, Kalil, who spent most of the Bush years at the University of California-Berkeley, is joining Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy as associate director. In that role, he gets a huge voice in steering the nation's research agenda and designing initiatives to boost math and science education. Two years ago, Kalil co-wrote a "national innovation agenda" that reads like Silicon Valley's holiday wish list. Among his suggestions was to make science and math learning more fun and calling for "new learning technologies that are as effective as a personal tutor and compelling as the best video game."