During last year's election, candidate Barack Obama staked out an expansive position on the ways that technology and the internet could be harnessed to open up the political process to ordinary citizens. And so far his administration has been delivering on many of his promises, most notably with projects like Data.gov, IT.Usaspending.gov and the Open Government Initiative, and potentially as well with the as-yet unfinished Recovery.gov site. Not only is the administration steadily making the federal government more transparent in its spending activities, it's beginning to involve the public directly in conceiving and drafting policy. Judging by their comments at this week's Personal Democracy Forum, and their work, like Vivek Kundra, Macon Phillips, and Beth Noveck seem quite comfortable trusting the "wisdom of crowds" and opening up the administration to approaches that trade some loss of control for a big increase in public participation.

But one element of his technology innovation agenda seems stuck in control mode: Obama's so-called "online townhalls." Yesterday's health care forum is a case in point. As far as I can tell, there was nothing about the collection of questions from participants online that made Obama's forum anything to get excited about. People were invited to submit questions via YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, but while this generated a lot of input--including a healthy number of video questions--so what?

• Obama Delivers Health Care Pitch, With a Sprinkle of People and a Dash of Digital For yesterday's 70-minute presidential health reform event at Northern Virginia Community College, the White House collected more than 450 video questions through YouTube in the days leading up to the event. President Barack Obama answered three of them. Not many, to be sure. But then again, a total of just eight questions on the proposed overhaul of the American health care system got asked in the hour-plus session, regardless of whether they came by video, via Twitter, or in the flesh. But an event like yesterday's raises a nagging question: Does the "online townhall" format simply break down when raised to the presidential level?

• From the White House Flickr stream: "WASP pilot Bernice Falk Haydu pulls back the chair of President Barack Obama after signing S.614, a bill to award a Congressional Gold Medal to the Women Airforce Service Pilots."
• The White House posts the salaries of some staffers, making use of Socrata ("Making Data Social").
• Maps from the New York Times digital folks: "The Shifting American Footprint in Iraq."
• NedaNet: "We're just computer hackers and computer users from all over the planet doing what we can to help the Iranian people in their struggle for freedom." Why they're needed: "People we talk to inside Iran say that almost no proxies are usable any more." The lesson: "[D]on't wait until the tanks are in the streets to figure this out, because by that point, you may have already lost the proxy war."
• Social media outreach is moving "in baby steps" in Afghanistan, but radio broadcasts of Pashto poetry seem to be well-received.
• Commerce and USDA release guidelines on who can get which money for what and how under the $7 billion broadband provision in the stimulus.
• VA CIO: "We should stop discussing how to move our 1970s-era COBOL systems into Web 2.0. It's not going to happen."
• Tweeting is changing farming.
• And David All is attempting to change tweeting -- or, at least, "have a little bit of fun" with an advocacy campaign targeted at @whitehouse.
• Speaking of using Twitter to advocate and agitate, @BarackObama's asking of folks to "PLS RT" a link to health care stories produced 355 retweets -- about one republishing for every 4,500 followers. (Thanks for the tip, you know who you are.)

That's if for me until Tuesday, folks, as I'm tacking on an extra day to the holiday. Enjoy your weekend.

(With Micah Sifry; White House photo by Pete Souza)

Via TechRepublican, we have video of RNC new media director Todd Herman's presentation at PdF '09 earlier this week. Herman's talk certainly caught attention, but what was also fascinating was to take in the reactions to it amongst the conference crowd. Our Andrew Rasiej described the audience as falling about 80% on the left side of the political spectrum and 20% on the right, but the more interesting split might have been between the political and the technological. While generalizing is generally a dumb thing to do, one impression take from the contemporaneous Twitter stream was that some more tech-minded folks applauded Herman's words about making transparency a "purple issue" while the more political amongst the crowd tended towards skepticism of the idea of a more open Republican Party.

But that's admittedly just a crude read, and you don't take my word for it. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, you can watch Herman's preso while reading the Twitter stream and it will seem as though it were happening in real time. Wow.

The congressionally-mandated Public Interest Declassification Board is making use of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's blog to collect public input on government-wide reform of how we approach the classification of information, as part of an attempt to deal with the secrecy-inflation in recent years that has seen every order form for a new carton of printer paper marked "Top Top Secret." At the moment, PIDB is most interested in figuring out whether it would help matters to establish a National Declassification Center. Join the discussion.

The first half-hour of yesterday's 70-minute presidential health reform event at Northern Virginia Community College was given over to a pair of introduction and then opening remarks from President Barack Obama. The White House collected more than 450 video questions through YouTube in the days leading up to the event. Obama answered three of them. Not many, to be sure. But then again, a total of just eight questions on the proposed overhaul of the American health care system got asked in the hour-plus session, regardless of whether they came by video, via Twitter, or in the flesh...

In a half-hour live chat conducted on the White House website and Facebook, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and White House new media director Macon Phillips explained the inspiration for and mechanics of a new federal tech spending oversight site that debuted at PdF '09 earlier this week. IT.USAspending.gov offers a portal onto agency spending data on high-dollar federal technology investments. During the live chat, Phillips pulled in questions from the Internet. (One the chat got rolling, Facebook questions, said Phillips, were coming in "fast and furious.") Kundra answered them -- including an intriguing little riff on how every new historical transformation in the nature of technology compels government to adapt, either to merely survive or, hopefully, to thrive.

Coming in at just under 30 minutes, true geeks are going to want more detail on the Kundra approach to data-enabled management. Most normal human beings are going to want less. But this lunch-time sized session of engagement is a low-bar way to include the greatest possible swath of citizens in the changing nature of government.

• PdF '09: Kundra Unveils IT Spending Dashboard At Personal Democracy Forum 2009 Tuesday morning, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra was rewarded with an enthusiastic standing ovation for pulling back the curtain on the federal IT spending dashboard he has been talking up in recent weeks, as an interface onto the biggest of the technology projects that are commissioned and executed under the vast umbrella of the federal government. While IT.USAspending.gov is in beta, the site has ambitions of opening up a portal onto the tremendous sums of money spent on federal information technology projects that have an unfortunate history of going horribly, miserably, disastrously wrong...

• Above is one of the few hundred video submissions for today's White House health care forum, this one on the feasibility of preventing a mass rush to a public option. This is the world we live in now: you can ask the American president a timely policy question without having to get out of bed.
• YouTube opens up call-to-action overlays.
• The Sunlight Foundation has launched what it's calling Transparency Corps. Devote a couple spare cycles to vetting earmark requests and other tasks that computers still need us humans to tackle.
• Prediction: social media leaderboards (i.e., displays of "top users" and the like like we used on Twitterslurp) are, for better or for worse, the next big, big thing.
• From yesterday at PdF, Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg responded to the nagging question of whether Mir Hossein Mousavi's Facebook profile is actually his own. "It looks like it's an official page," she said, "but...you know."
• The CIA website makes a clickity-clickity noise. (Thanks Shaun Dakin)
• Arne Duncan announces a new, simpler web-based FAFSA.
• Russia wants an international cybersecurity treaty. The U.S. isn't so keen on the idea.
• And New York Observer's Felix Gillette has a thought-provoking look at how the TV networks handled broadcasting the video of Neda Agha-Soltan's death. Said one exec: "By telling our viewers that it's on YouTube, anybody who is watching our broadcast could go and watch the video if they're so inclined."

Once again, President Barack Obama will be taking questions from the Internet. Saying "inaction is not an option," Obama announced through a YouTube video that the White House will today host one of their special-blend online townhalls that mixes together Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and live video streaming on White House Live. The special guest? The president himself. The subject? What Americans are wrestling with when it comes to health care costs, coverage, and choice. Obama will field some of the questions plucked by his staff from the more than 450 YouTube responses to his announcement, as well as Twitter and Facebook feeds. Health care staff will reportedly be on hand to field stumpers, and the White House promises to follow up with some of the questions that they don't get to today. The event starts at 1:15pm EDT, but head on over to Facebook now to watch as they set the stage and prepare for the event. It's not entirely clear that they're aware that the camera is already on.

The White House is promoting today's online town hall by posting some of the YouTube video responses smack dab in the middle of the WhiteHouse.gov home page. Is that you, top left?