Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team - Case Study
The Citizen's Briefing Book: An Online Portal for Change





Situation: In the weeks leading up to the inauguration of President Obama, his Transition Team set out to engage U.S. citizens to share their ideas on the issues facing the new administration.  Consistent with Obama's record for leveraging best-of-breed business strategies for use in government contexts, he and his team opted to enable an online community where visitors could submit ideas, review others' ideas, and vote for their favorite ideas.  The online community – named the Citizen's Briefing Book - would be available to the public for approximately one week prior to the inauguration, after which time the top-ranked ideas would be compiled by the Transition Team to produce a physical Briefing Book for the new President.

Solution: The portal was built upon Force.com, the central development platform of Salesforce.com.  As a premier implementation partner for this platform, Reside's role in the project was to work directly with the Presidential Transition Team to seamlessly integrate the design and functionality of the Citizen's Briefing Book (on Force.com) to Obama's existing Website: http://change.gov. 

The overall design, development and implementation were completed in less than four weeks to enable the site's launch by the critical deadline.  Among key considerations during development was the probability of high volume traffic to the site, as well as the need to enable Single Sign-On as an enhancement to the features of Force.com. 

Integration elements of the Citizen’s Briefing Book included:

• Ideas (Force.com)
• Change.gov (President-elect Obama's Website)
• Login/Register (Amazon Web Services for Single Sign-On)
• Akamai Content Distribution Network (for peak volume management)

Results: During the week of the site's public existence, the Citizen's Briefing Book had more than 125,000 users who submitted more than 44,000 ideas and cast over 1.4 million votes.  Leading themes on idea submissions included the Economy, followed by Energy and Environment. 

Not only did the site capture the attention of U.S. citizens, but it also got rave reviews from many mainstream news circuits and professional bloggers.  The strong consensus was an overall appreciation for the transparency and dialogue enabled by the portal, and recognition of Obama's consistency in engaging the public to be a voice for change in partnership with his administration. 

Several ideas posted on the portal included positive feedback for the online community concept itself, as well as suggestions for additional features and functionality. 

In the Client's Words:
The initiative was a success in the eyes of the public as well as the Presidential Transition Team.  Michael Strautmanis, Public Liaison & Intergovernmental Affairs Director, made the following statement via an online video on the site: "We have had an unbelievable response...on all of the issues that you, the American people are interested in. ...Thank you so much for participating and engaging...We’re looking forward to working with you as we work to deliver real change to America."