Daily Digest: Fighting for a See-Through Stimulus

• Recovery.gov: Washington is going crazy over snappy domain names. First there was Change.gov, and now this. "Acknowledging concerns about potential government waste," reads a draft of the multi-billion-dollar stimulus package currently being hashed out on Capitol Hill, "Congress is creating a Web site -- http://www.recovery.gov -- to allow the public to track stimulus spending and file complaints." What with Office and Management and Budget nominee Peter Orszag rhapsodizing about his vision of an "OMB Version 2.0" during his confirmation hearing, why, you'd almost start to think that the federal government has suddenly found itself a proud member of the Internet age. But the Sunlight Foundation's Paul Blumenthal *brings us back from that happy place by pointing us to an amendment to round two of the financial bailout package, introduced by Minnesota Representative Tim Walz (DFL), that would clarify that "public" oversight of TARP spending means posting contracts and reports online -- not, you know, nailing them to the door of the Capitol Building, Martin Luther's 95 Theses-style.**

• CTO Face Off: Warrior vs. Civil Servant: Remember that Silicon Alley Insider post a few weeks back that reported President-elect Barack Obama was looking to appoint a first federal CTO who was a Silicon Valley-rooted doctorate-holding scientist? Hmm, not so much. At least, not if Steve Hamm's report in BusinessWeek is on the money. Hamm writes that Obama's choices have narrowed to the District of Columbia's CTO Vivek Kundra and Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior. (Neither is a PhD. Kundra is a government official while Warrior is a business leader. And neither have much in the way of Silicon Valley roots.) We've written about Kundra before, but let's get to know Warrior. A graduate of the Delhi campus of the famed Indian Institute of Technoloy, Warrior spent decades at Motorola before joining up with Cisco in 2007. She's known as a talented public speaker, and while at the phone company kept what GigaOm's Om Malik has called "a popular blog." Whether it's Kundra or Warrior, either would be powerful commentary on the considerable prominence of Indian-American in U.S. tech circles.

• Question FAIL? Or All According to Plan?: For next week's print issue of The Nation, Ari Melber recaps how Change.gov's Open for Questions feature took a pass on a tough question on prosecuting the Bush Administration, only to have it put directly to the President-elect by ABC's*** George Stephanopoulos. "It is striking that Obama's aides, who helped win the election by harnessing new media," writes Melber "believed they could just spin away from their online interlocutors. Instead, the move backfired immediately." Perhaps. But an alternative interpretation would be that those aides see the episode as having played out quite well. The question got asked. And Obama, eventually, provided an answer -- with the political cover of being "forced" to go on record on it only under Stephanopoulos's browbeating.

• Honda Online: Silicon Valley congressman Mike Honda (D) was eager to use the Internet to "follow the exciting trail blazed by our next President." So he challenged his constituents to a Facebook contest: tell Honda either (a) why they really, really wanted to go to next week's inauguration festivities or (b) their best ideas for education reform. The prize? Two tickets to said inauguration. Among the ten lucky winners was Amani Green, who entered via a video in which she raps about how she campaigned on Obama's behalf. It's worth a watch if only to see how she rhymes "discussed it with my friends" with "went guerilla flyering from 11 to 3 a.m." Honda, a former teacher, later blogged that he was so impressed with the education ideas submitted that he's using them to inspire new legislation.

• The Online Battle to Head the GOP: Michigan GOP chief Saul Anuzis is considered one of the leading candidates for RNC chair, but how much is his intense focus on modernizing the Republican Party through tech helping his campaign? Well, he seems to think it's working. In a new YouTube video, Anuzis gives a shout out to "online strategists" and hammers on the idea that the future of the GOP must be a wired one. Now, few of those online strategists are among the 168 voting members of the RNC, but hey, something similar worked for Howard Dean. To be sure, the websites of five other candidates for RNC chair are decked out with varying degrees of social-media bling. But in his campaign Anuzis has, more than any other contender, made the Internet not only the medium but the message.

• Scraping Change: Concerned that Change.gov will evaporate into the ether come Wednesday, Sunlight Labs director Clay Johnson challenged Sunlight staff to capture the contents of the site's Your Seat at the Table feature, which records transition meeting materials. Of course, they got that taken care of lickety-split, and Sunlight is now sharing the code behind the scrape so that you might conduct your own. The episode raises a good question, though: is Change.gov bound by the same federal archiving rules of true government sites? Let us know if you know.

• Inauguration Viewing: Stuck behind a desk Tuesday? Video site Ustream will be livestreaming its custom coverage of the inauguration, complete with the chat overlays the site is known for. What's more, they're working on a companion iPhone app. If you are at work Tuesday, a recommendation: try crowding around a co-workers desk to watch inaugural events, so as not to pull down your office's entire network. Or better yet, "borrow" a projector from the IT team and beam the happenings onto a wall.

In Case You Missed It...

Matt Burton seconds a recommendation that the first federal CTO seek to help others in government do their jobs better, not take the lead in reinventing the wheel.

Nancy Scola says that NPR.org-led InaugurationReport might prove the first draft of inaugural history and highlights an impressive Dopplr-report on where in the world Barack Obama found himself in 2008.

*Correction: This item originally referred to the Sunlight Foundation's Bill Allison, who -- while an engaging blogger, to be sure -- was not actually the author of the post in question. That post was, in fact, written by his colleague Paul Blumenthal. I regret the error.

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

*Correction: As it turns out, George Stephanolopous is on ABC, not CBS, as the post originally stated.

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

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