Daily Digest: Remodeling Change.gov, from Inside and Out

• Open for Questions, Iterated and Improved: Launched at yesterday lunchtime, the second round of Change.gov's Open for Questions -- the Obama transition team's attempt to tap into the questions Americans most want their next president to answer -- has already pulled in 1,753,453 votes from 39,860 people on 33,150 questions. The first OFQ round just attracted a million votes. That wowza response is encouraging, especially considering that the official response to the round one's questions were lame retreads of policy-memo talking points. There seems to be a hopeful feedback loop at work. After cranky complaints about the site's clunky navigation in the early going, you can now organize the questions by category (Economy, National Security, Foreign Policy, Education, Health Care, Energy & Environment, Science & Technology, and a catch-all "Additional Issues"). Progress! Cross your fingers that this iteration produces answers that get to the spirit of the question, rather than the strangled "depends on the definition of 'is'" responses of the first round.

• Using Change.gov to Push for a Bush Prosecutor: The Nation's Ari Melber sees in Open for Questions a chance to advance question that the press corps seems loathe to ask: will President Obama appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration on torture, warrantless wiretapping, and more? Democrats.com's Bob Fertik pushed the question in Round 1, but it came in sixth, with only the top five getting answered. As activist Jon Pincus notes, rallying your comrades around your query is made all the more difficult by the fact that Google Moderator has no provision for linking to specific questions -- taking a good deal of the agency in the process away from the public, no? Organizing support for your interests is a hallmark of democracy, and Open for Questions would be well served by building in the potential to rally the troops. Fertik's work-around: search for "Fitzgerald," as in Peter Fitzgerald, his pick for prosecutor. Writes Melber: "[I]t is up to the rest of us to put accountability and the rule of law on the agenda. Change.gov is a fine place to start."

• Meeting Openness FAIL?: The Chicago Sun-Times' Lynn Sweet is beating up on Obama for his Seat at the Table feature, which posts the printed materials from meetings held by the transition team. In a way, Sweet has a point. Posting memos and briefing docs is great, but there's so little context on these get-togethers given -- Who inside and outside the transition attended the meeting? What was discussed? What agreements were reached? -- that it's tough to tease out much real meaning from a few dry PDFs. But an "F"? Given that Obama's has been the most transparent transition since, oh, ever, giving it the lowest grade on the charts seems tough to justify. They don't even deserve an F+?

• Gatekeeping Between You and a White House Job: Change.gov's resume collection feature was, at its highest calling, a way to level the playing field for administration hopefuls. But Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown reports that some outside advocacy groups have taken it upon themselves to act as gatekeepers, vetting resumes and passing along the chosen ones to the Obama transition team. For example, the Feminist Majority, Brown reports, has set up a closed-doors wiki that lets its allies evaluate women candidates for executive branch jobs. There's also the Diversity in Democracy Project, being run by the Warren Institute at the University of California, Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law: "The project will use assessment tools provided by the Korn/Ferry International executive recruiting firm to help match applicants' resumes with jobs. And then a bi-partisan board...will winnow down the list and offer a pool of candidates matched up to administration jobs." The National Council of Asian Pacific Americans Recommendations is providing a similar service. Of course, in some ways self-appointed gatekeepers is a predictable response to a flaw in the systems set up on Change.gov. Having a handful of staffers vet the hundreds of thousands of resumes that have poured in through the site isn't exactly a practical way to award these much-desired jobs.

• War and Social Media: As the Israeli air strikes on Gaza rage on, elements in the Israeli government are eager to win the public relations battle -- especially after some sentiment that it bungled the PR over the 2006 war in Lebanon. Of a piece with the "Public Diplomacy 2.0" that the U.S. State Department is experimenting with under Undersecretary James Glassman, the Israeli consulate in New York will be holding what it's calling a "Citizens' Press Conference" this afternoon -- wholly on Twitter. Tweet your questions to @israelconsulate, marked with the hashtag #AskIsrael (and the hashtag #Gaza where appropriate). (via Xeni Jardin) This effort in war-time diplomacy via social media is the work of David Saranga, the consulate's media man in New York who has been working stateside to rebrand Israel in the eyes of the world. Social media's also at play in other ways in this difficult situation. Hard-line opposition leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is tweeting through the crisis (though largely in Hebrew -- anyone care to translate?). The Twitter channel @QassamCount is tweeting micro-accounts of the Hamas rockets into southern Israel that Jerusalem is citing as the provocation for the violence: "4:53pm: 2 Qassam rockets land in open areas in Eshkol Regional Council." And the Israel Defense Forces' YouTube channel is running video of the attacks in Gaza in an effort to show that their air strikes are only hitting narrowly-defined targets.

• Wanted: 21st Century Czar: USA Today's Jill Lawrence highlights the two somewhat distinct thrusts of the job of the yet-to-be-appointed U.S. Chief Technology Officer: bringing the federal government into the 21st century in terms of technological infrastructure and practices, and making the most of the nation's technological potential "across all sectors — government, business, academia." Lawrence quotes our Andrew Rasiej on the underlying mission that should inform every aspect of the post: "What we need is a visionary voice with a seat at every table, at every Cabinet meeting, to make sure that we have a 21st-century perspective."

• Celebrating the Federal Web's Front Line: Craig "craigslist" Newmark is a big fan of the work being done by the Federal Web Managers Council, efforts we've been highlighting with pleasure on techPresident. Writes Newmark, "We have something real going on, change in the way government works from the line workers."

• The Best (and Worst) of '08: We're putting together a list of the highlights and lowlights in poli-tech from 2008. Got nominations? Let us know.

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