Daily Digest: CTO Watch -- The Rising Stock of California PhDs

• Chief Openness Officer, PhD: As we keep up the vigil on Barack Obama's naming of a Chief Technology Officer, let's have a look at both what some close watchers want from the first federal CTO and what the gossip on the street says about what the incoming administration has in mind for the job. A great pick for CTO, says the Sunlight Foundation's John Wonderlich, would focus on making democracy more transparent and interactive.* (Note that that's a description that stops well short of a possibility we've touched on here in the digest, of a CTO charged with pumping up American innovation by building bridges between industry, academia, and government.) In the end, of course, the choice is Obama's alone to make, and Silicon Alley Insider's Eric Krangel reports on what he's hearing the transition looking for: a CTO with a PhD who hails from Silicon Valley, but with more of a science than business bent. That could describe some oft-mentioned candidates, like Vint Cerf for one. But it might mean that our collective response to hearing the CTO pick may well be, "who?"

• At What Stage Will We See the Stimulus?: In congressional meetings on Obama's proposed stimulus package, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor, reports the New York Times' Jeff Zeleny and David M. Herszenhorn, pushed the President-elect to "put the entire contents of the legislation online in a user-friendly way to see how the money is being spent." Obama reportedly agreed with the suggestion. The Heritage Foundation's Robert Bluey is thrilled, saying "[c]onservatives must hold Obama and his administration accountable for his transparency promises." But let's tease apart exactly what we're talking about here. One proposal, advanced by top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell, is to give the public a chance to vet the bill before it becomes law. A second option is to make possible real-time public oversight of how those billions are being spent after the stimulus package has passed. So which is it that Cantor's proposing and Obama's agreeing to? Unclear. But according to a wire report on Cantor's recollection of the exchange, Obama told the congressman that he had "something in the works."

• Labor Icon Lights Up the Online Left: Labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan is a big name in small circles as the author of "Which Side Are You On?," his 1991 look at the state and promise of the American union movement. Geoghegan's announcement yesterday that he aims to replace Rahm Emanuel as the representative from Illinois's fifth district sparked intense interest among the online left, many of whose members learned labor history at least in part from his work. His announcement diary was the belle of the ball on Daily Kos yesterday, and he's already raised $31,000 on Act Blue. That's a base of support that's greatly helpful to a first-time politician trying to quickly get traction in a compressed special-election schedule, as the primary in IL-5 is just seven weeks away.

• Food Fight: There's an interesting under-the-radar online tussle happening around the future of American agriculture and the future of Tom Vilsack. StopVilsack.org was launched by a collection of organic farmers and food activists to object to former Iowa governor's nomination serve as Secretary of Agriculture -- a quixotic quest, given that Vilsack is well liked on Capitol Hill. What's popped up in response, reports La Vida Locavore's Jill Richardson is the social-media friendly SupportVilsack.com, a site backed by food-world figures from Whole Foods, Stonyfield Farm, and Sunny Valley Bars. The different approaches exposes a divide over industrial organics and other corporately-produced "good food," but the argument might be moot: there's talk that instead of heading up Ag, Vilsack might replace Bill Richardson as Obama's Commerce Secretary pick. Food Democracy Now, an online effort backed by folks like Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, isn't waiting around to see how the top job shakes out, though. They're circulating a list of a dozen possible USDA undersecretaries they see as suitably committed to a sustainable food future.

• APIs.gov: Over on the Atlantic, New America Foundation's Douglas McGray does a bang-up job explaining the governing importance of APIs, a.k.a. Application Programming Interfaces, a.k.a., the online doodads that make it trivial to share government data. Two points are of particular note. The first is that USAspending.gov, the site that resulted Obama and Senator Tom Coburn's (D-OK) legislation on government contract transparency, extends its usefulness with an API. And the second is one that the data interfaces are especially powerful because they bake openness right into government operations. Writes McGray, "It's not just the API that's a big deal, Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief data architect, told me. 'It's the discipline an API imposes.'"

In Case You Missed It...

In "Small Tents vs. Big Networks," Nancy Scola takes a bite at the ongoing debate over what role technology will play in the revitalization of the GOP.

Vegas, baby! Mike Turk is off to the Consumer Electronics Show, in search of "tools and technologies that could be used for political purposes," and he wants to know if there's anything he can hunt down for you.

*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.

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