• Also set loose by the Obama White House this week: the latest batch of records on who comes into and goes out of the White House.
• Twinterviewing Patrick Ruffini.
• Rachel Maddow calls out a PR firm for anti-health care reform video games.
• There's a brand new Dems.gov in town, and yes it's running Drupal.
• Julius Genachowski does the Digg Dialogg circuit.
• Stimulus Watch gets an upgrade.
• And "the web is a boon for bullies."
• Happy Thanksgiving, folks. Catch you Monday.

(With Micah Sifry and Nick Judd)

Here's an intriguing job opening. Rock Creek Strategic Marketing is the web firm that the Obama White House has been working with to, when the need arises, supplement its new media team that consists of eight or so political appointees. The firm, according to Dow Jones, is currently working with the White House to build out certain areas of the Obama Administration's core capabilities, like generating a Spanish-language version of WhiteHouse.gov. But more than that, what catches the eye is that Rock Creek also happens right now to be in the market for a programmer who has both (a) considerable Drupal chops and (b) a clean enough nose to qualify for U.S. government security clearance:

Rock Creek Strategic Marketing...seeks a website developer to perform ongoing development and integration tasks for an on-site position in the DC metro area. In this position, you will work directly with the client to gather information, requirements, and enhance the website. Work will primarily focus on the Drupal CMS ranging from module development to front-end coding and posting of content. The position will also involve interaction with the open source community.

Or, in other words, there's a very good chance that what we're looking at here is an open call for someone to serve in the capacity of first ever Drupaler of the United States.

"Thank you for prying yourselves away from Going Rouge." That was David Plouffe's way of welcoming us to a conference call to discuss his own version of a campaign memoir, the newly released The Audacity to Win. (Check out Colin Delaney's helpful short guide to reading the book for the chewy digital bits.) The point of these "blogger calls" gets fuzzy as the months go by, where it's never quite clear to either principle or participant if the bloggers on the call are press, activists, some hybrid of the two, or something else entirely. Plouffe got a mix of questions from angry advocates, progressive press, interested technology writers, and more.

Including a hard ball from me. Or, at least, a question meant to dig out Plouffe's thinking on whether strategy behind the methodical plod to the White House he details so carefully in the book has an resonance now that we've a President Obama, big problems to solve, and no metrics so gloriously measurable as winning Iowa, raising half a billion dollars online, or knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors. The Obama campaign was soaring, no doubt. But a presidential election has a structure to it that government can't match. You know long in advance when each primary state will vote (well, there was the Florida/Michigan dustup of this past election season -- which Plouffe calls "Florigan" -- but that was a fairly unusual case.) You know where and when your parties nominating election is going to be held many months ahead. There are delegates to be racked up, electoral college votes to secure. There are things to measure, milestones to achieve. Campaigns are a bit like baseball that way.

And governing, it might be fair to say, is somewhat more like soccer. Nothing happens for a long time. People mill about. And then, wham! Something changes the game entirely. You put your best players on the field, but strategy is generally something reserved for set plays and making the coach feel like he or she is actually playing a role in the match. There's a reason we don't keep real stats. So I asked, Plouffe, is it possible that what he cooked up for Organizing for America, a strategy of checking boxes and amassing wins, simply doesn't translate to changing the country to the legislative process without a huge amount of misplaced energy, at least in the near term?

"You're right," said Plouffe...

I'm really pleased with how everything went at PdF Europe's first conference in Barcelona. We had a great mix of political hacks and hackers from all over the Continent, and the conversations buzzing in the hallways before, during and after each session are the best proof that people were connecting to each other in all kinds of fruitful ways. (Indeed, the continuing buzz on Twitter around the hashtag #pdfeu is the best proof to me that we planted many productive seeds at the Torre Agbar.)

I know, you think I'm engaging in a bit of hyperbole when I say that Blue State Digital, the firm closely tied to the online arm of the Obama campaign, is taking over the world. And perhaps I am, a bit. But then you crack open the in-flight magazine of Iberia Airlines on the way home from PdF Europe only to read all about how Miguel Zugaza, director of the world-famous Prado Museum, is revamping the institution's online strategy (working with BSD) to reach some multiple of the number of flesh and blood people who walk through its doors in Madrid each day.

We've been covering in some detail the U.S. State Department's efforts to foster new conversations and smooth some of life's more difficult transactions using technology, from promoting digital violence tracking in Mexico to encouraging social networking in Pakistan to setting up mobile banking in Afghanistan. Some of these efforts seem simple, but eliminating some of life's fear and confusion -- whether that's engaging with a wider circle of humans or making it physically safe for women to play a role in a country's burgeoning economy -- holds the promise of being transformative. Earlier this year, the State Department took a delegation of U.S. tech company representatives to Baghdad. They met with students, they met with elected officials. And one of the things they heard is that the gap that exists between your average Iraqi trying to make a life for himself or herself and Iraqis in government is frustrating, alienating, and only serves to worsen the assumption of many everyday Iraqi nationals that they don't have a role to play in their country's uncertain future.

This morning, as a direct outgrowth of that trip, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced that the Iraqi national government has just launched its own YouTube channel, online at YouTube.com/IraqiGov. YouTube's Steve Grove has more.

• Such as it is. Whether or not there is a nascent pan-Euro conversation was a big topic of conversation, and some preliminary mapping from the company Linkfluence suggests that the circles of discussion in Europe tend to cluster around the countries in which they take place.
• Hope is fading fast. A slight tweak to Shepard Fairey's iconic image and the message is completely different.
• The case for video games.
• Twitter lists haven't really seem to have caught on, but at these some folks are making use of the ability to group together Twitter users according to a theme. The White House has made a list of the tweet feeds of its brothers and sisters in government. DM them if you know of someone or something they've missed.
• Googlifying the law. "We're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in."
• ActBlue ramps up its Twitter tie ins. Pretty soon, you'll be able to donate just by picturing the face of your chosen candidate and blinking twice.
• And finally, the truth comes out: fiber optics isn't a real thing.

U.S. Deputy CIO for open government Beth Noveck surveys the landscape, finding experiments in participatory democracy bubbling up throughout these United States:

Inspired by the President’s call for more open government, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts launched its data catalogue, following in the footsteps of Washington, DC, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere around the country (as well as cities in Canada and the UK), to provide public access to information by and about government. What makes this exciting is not merely having transportation information available in machine-readable formats, but that professional and amateur enthusiasts can then get together, as they did last weekend, to create new software applications and data visualizations to better enable public transit riders to track arrival times for the next subway, bus, or ferry. Publishing government information online facilitates this kind of useful collaboration between government and the public that transforms dry data into the tools that improve people’s lives. (For another great example, check out what happened when we published the Federal Register for people to use.)

The National Association of State CIOs is helping to spur this movement toward greater data transparency at the state level by publishing “Guidance for Opening the Doors to State Data.”

Just as the federal government is using online brainstorming with government employees and the public to generate ideas for saving money or going green, state and local governments are also using new technology to tap people’s intelligence and expertise. The City of Manor, Texas (pop. 5800) has launched “Manor Labs,” an innovation marketplace for improving city services.  A participant can sign up to suggest “ideas and solutions” for the police department, the municipal court, and everything in between. Each participant’s suggestion is ranked and rewarded with “innobucks.” These innobucks points can be redeemed for prizes: a million innobucks points wins “mayor for the day” while 400,000 points can be traded for a ride-along with the Chief of Police.

Exciting stuff, and one tangible outgrowth of President Obama's call for more open government does seem to be the freedom and inspiration it has delivered unto those working at all levels of government. To get at the actual links to the projects and programs Noveck mentions, though, you'll have to click through to her original post. The White House still insists on attaching warning notices to every external link on Obama Administration sites, which messes up the underlying code and makes it more difficult for normal folk to remix and reuse what the White House open government team is putting out into the world. There's an irony in there somewhere...

Hurricanes might gather force, low-lying areas pool with water, and wildfires rage much as they long have. But today they rise as a challenge to a different American people. From mobile phones to Twitter, the communications networks woven into our daily lives would be unrecognizable to the victims of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. That much is obvious. But it's probably also fair to say that they represent a change from even the way people were carrying on digital relationships with one another on September 11th, 2001, or when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf Coast in the last summer of 2005. How can we take what we know and are learning about online and offline engagement and use it to better respond when disaster strikes?

Questions like that are what find FEMA Director Craig Fugate hanging out in some unusual places these days, like brainstorming with hackers in the Google mecca of Mountain View, California, about how civic-minded technologists can use their powers for good. Fugate [Few-gate] speaks with a Florida twang, a reflection of his deep personal and professional roots in that state. Fugate's appointment by President Obama was an acknowledgement that as Florida's chief disaster specialist, Fugate turned himself into one of the most innovative and respected emergency management specialists in the United States. Our cell-phone to land-line connection kept cutting in and out during the course of our conversation, which is probably wise to take as a warning against hubris about relying upon technologies. But Fugate, I found during our interview, blends real passion for the potential of tech with an awareness that the Holy Grail here isn't better technology itself. It's helping people survive and thrive amidst some of life's most difficult conditions.