Add another layer onto the Obama administration’s ties to Google. Obama’s Director of Citizen Participation is reportedly going to be Google Product Manager Katie Jacobs Stanton.
This is according to Peter Kafka at All Things Digital, who turns to her LinkedIn profile to get an idea of her past experience. In that you will find that she was involved with Google Finance as well as Open Social. She’s been with Google since 2003, and before that worked as a production manager at Yahoo (and worked with Yahoo Finance), and with Chase.
This obviously isn’t the first time we have seen connections between Google and the President. Kafka notes that Google Moderator was used for people to submit questions for the debates, as well as for suggestions on the Change.gov site.
Of course there was Vint Cerf and Eric Schmidt himself very openly endorsing Obama during the campaign run. With questions coming up about Google having political bias in search results, all of this gets some wheels turning (although based on the examples talked about here, I don’t see it).
When you look at Google though, it’s hard not to expect some great technological minds to come from the company. It’s not hard to see why Obama would want this type of mind on his staff.
