Diagnosing Delivery Problems in the White House Information-Distribution System

A collaborative effort between the White House Office of Media Affairs, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and others quickly created a workable framework for wide-scale distribution of a stream of daily documents originating from the Executive Office of the President. The document stream includes daily press briefings, speeches by the President and other officials, backgrounders, and proclamations. In addition, the stream of released information includes special documents such as the National Performance Review's reports on reinventing government, the proposed healthcare reform legislation, and the yearly budgets. The Intelligent Information Infrastructure Project at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created an information distribution server that functions as the focal point of the distribution chain. Documents are released from the Executive Office of the President through this system; they are sent from this system to a variety of archiving and retrieval systems around the country, most online services (for example, Compuserve, America Online), about 4000 direct subscribers to the MIT server, and a variety of other servers that further redistribute the documents.