Barack Obama - Agenda Setters 2009
Name: Barack Obama
Title: US President
Position: 7 Last year: Not ranked
Why? For making technology a priority in the White House
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Closest Rivals
- Evan Williams Twitter CEO and co-founder
- Jimmy Wales Wiki Media founder and co-founder of Wikipedia
- Eric Schmidt Google CEO
- Rupert Murdoch News Corp CEO
- Mark Zuckerberg Facebook founder
- Barack Obama US President
- Tim Berners-Lee Father of the world wide web
- Nandan Nilekani Head of the Unique Identification Authority of India and co-founder of Infosys
- Larry Ellison Oracle CEO
- Niklas Zennström Co-founder of Skype, Joost, Joltid, Kazaa
- Christian Engström Deputy chairman of the Swedish Pirate Party
US President Barack Obama entered the White House with a pledge to use technology to transform government.
Since then the BlackBerry-loving President has made a start on realising his promise to be one of the US' most tech-savvy leaders and has appointed a CIO and CTO to help him.
Obama's tech leanings became clear when he made extensive use of social media sites Twitter and Facebook during his presidential campaign and secured millions of donations online.
He solidified his geek-cred with his fight to hold onto his beloved BlackBerry so he could continue sending and receiving emails.
Obama showed that his commitment to tech was more than just words when he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which will guarantee $7.2bn investment in broadband projects.
Another initiative, the "virtual town hall", has enabled the public to vote for changes in legislation.
Obama and his tech team are committed to several challenging tasks, including the upgrading of out-of-date White House computer systems and making official data available on the data.gov website.
One panellist praised Obama for having "ignited mainstream imagination around technology's relevance to day-to-day life".
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