One hundred days has not been nearly enough time to achieve his ambitious goals, but academics, technology analysts and nonpartisan groups say the man billed as the first "tech president" is off to a good start.

On January 21, his first full day in office, Obama issued a memo informing the heads of agencies and departments that making government "transparent, participatory and collaborative" was a top priority of his administration.

The primary vehicle for accomplishing his goals -- the Internet.

Besides revamping the official White House website, WhiteHouse.gov, the Obama administration has created several other sites including recovery.gov to track the economic stimulus bill and transparency.gov to monitor spending.

It has also announced plans to launch data.gov, a site which will "make a broad array of US government data" available to the public.

"Besides just making his Saturday speeches YouTube events, they're treating the Web operations of the administration as a sort of frontline aspect of their policy," said Lee Rainie of the Washington-based Pew Research Center.

"They've put together a team of folks with the goal of taking e-government to the next level," said Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

"But it's one thing to say that the White House is going to act this way," Rainie cautioned. "Whether other parts of the executive branch are going to be as happy to embrace these applications remains to be seen."

Julie Germany, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, said the first indications are positive.

"What we're starting to see in Washington is a level of excitement among the government employees who are going to be executing the strategy," she told AFP. "They're excited about it. It's not like they're afraid and running."

Germany said Obama's landmark transparency memo "created the vision for how the administration is going to be run."

"Since then we've seen the administration continue to use technology to communicate with people," she said, citing the recent online "town hall" in which Obama responded to questions from the public submitted via the Web.

"This is going to be a work in progress," she added. "The first 100 days just set the stage."

John Wonderlich, policy director at the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation, which promotes using the Web to make government information more available to the public, said "their first pronouncements are very encouraging."

"But a lot of the challenge is going to come in the implementation," he said.

Wonderlich noted that Obama had failed to stick to his campaign pledge to display all non-emergency legislation for public comment on the White House website for five days before signing it into law.

"I think the idea is well ahead of the implementation," he said. "I'm not sure that they've made it a priority to live up to that particular pledge.

"At the same time we've seen a lot of planning about ways to make that a possibility," Wonderlich added.

Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of TechPresident.com, a blog about technology and politics, said the administration "has been doing as much as it can to fulfil its promises in regards to transparency and technological innovation."

"However they've been constrained by decades of industrial-age rules and regulations and procurement protocols that are handicapping the speed at which they can implement that vision," he said.

"As a candidate Obama proved to be a great surfer on the tsunami of voter-generated content and the rise of social networks," he said. "And he's clearly indicated that he's ready to jump on his surfboard as president and continue to ride that wave."

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