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Last Friday was my last day at the White House. As I begin my fellowship at Harvard University, I'd like to share my reflections on public service.  "On a bright February day, the previous morning's dusting of snow melting on the ground, I arrived at a White House that was, as the Washington Post put it, "stuck" in the "Dark Ages of technology." In their words, "If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past." As my team congratulated me on the new job, they handed me a stack of documents with $27 billion worth of technology projects that were years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget. At the time, those documents were what passed for real-time updates on the performance of IT projects. My neighbor's ten year old could look up the latest stats of his favorite baseball player on his phone on the school bus, but I couldn't get an update on how we were spending billions of taxpayer dollars while at my desk in the White House. And at the same time, the President of the United States had to fight tooth and nail to simply get a blackberry.  These were symptoms of a much larger problem.

WWII posters redone to reflect a social media world.  Examples: "Someone Tweeted", "Knowledge Wins, Wikipedia is Free", "Loose tweets sink fleets" and many more. 

Before May 1st, not even the smartest of machine learning algorithms could have predicted Keith Urbahn's online relevancy score, or his potential to spark an incredibly viral information flow. While politicos "in the know" certainly knew him or of him, his previous interactions and size and nature of his social graph did little to reflect his potential to generate thousands of people's willingness to trust within a matter of minutes. While connections, authority, trust and persuasiveness play a key role in influencing others, they are only part of a complex set of dynamics that affect people's perception of a person, a piece of information or a product. Timing, initiating a network effect at the right time, and frankly, a dash of pure luck matter equally.