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?

Big news! Personal Democracy Forum Europe, our first conference overseas, is happening November 21-22 in Barcelona, at the Torre Agbar (pictured below). To get on the mailing list for more details, go to www.personaldemocracy.eu and sign up!

Time for a quick update about next week's Personal Democracy Forum.

A number of people have asked about opportunities for collaboration during this year's Personal Democracy Forum, and in response to their suggestions, we're pleased to announce that Monday evening June 29, immediately after the first day's formal sessions end and during the conference cocktail party, we're inviting attendees to lead or join in informal BOF sessions at Jazz at Lincoln Center. BOF as in "birds-of-a-feather flock together," that is.

Here are the details on three sessions that various folks have already been working on: Hacking the City, Demoing DemDash, and Open Questions/Citizen Media. We're also going to put up a conference wiki shortly, to enable attendees to sign up and start connecting around these session, post additional ideas, and also share other self-organized plans like themed dinners or late-night jaunts. Stay tuned for details.

(Photo of starlings in formation courtesy of Fi in Eden)

At least one author of the "Best Congressional Tweets of the Week" (as picked last Sunday by The Washingtonian) isn't actually a real Member of Congress. So if you are one of the 645 people who have been following the account of @deanheller, thinking that you were communing with the Republican congressman from Nevada's second district, think again.

In fact, until Monday, you've been following "Anon Guy," a Nevada blogger who decided earlier this week to come clean (sort of, since we don't yet know who s/he is), and admit that he or she had been successfully impersonating his representative, Congressman Dean Heller, on Twitter for the last five months. That's the story Anon Guy tells in a highly entertaining series of blog posts that describe how he started the account on a lark last December 28, how being picked up by the aggregator Tweet Congress led to a healthy jump in followers, including "an entire civics class from a Nebraska continuation high school," activist conservatives jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, and a smattering of fellow Congressmen, and how the local media started to report on "@deanheller" and his supposed presence on Twitter.

The quality of the dialogue on the Office of Science and Technology Policy's Open Government blog continues to improve, day by day. Clearly, the folks running the show are learning as they go, and trying to tweak how they blog about policy so that a useful conversation can flourish. But the process still leaves a lot to be desired, which may be more the fault of the topic at hand and the tools available, then the specific choices being made by the OSTP's team. Should we drawing big conclusions from this experiment? Or should we treat is a big experiment, but just one of many that need to happen before we can draw firm conclusions about the prospects for involving the public in developing policy using online collaboration tools? (I think the latter.)

Here are some examples of what I mean. First the good news: The majority of the comments now appearing on the OSTP blog are serious efforts by citizens, and in some cases domain experts, to engage with the questions on tap...

Right now, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's blog is in the middle of the second, "Discussion," phase of its unique effort to engage the public online in fleshing out the details of President Obama's Open Government Directive. After a bit of a rocky start, with a flood of semi-disruptive posts from "birthers," the conversation seems to be finding its footing. A new post by Robynn Sturm, titled "Transparency: Open Government Operations," raises some interesting questions and is generating equally stimulating answers. She writes:

As the Obama Administration contemplates new approaches to making government more open, we want to hear from you. What do you – the non-profit fighting in the public interest, the company creating jobs for Americans, the journalist engaged in newsgathering, the teacher of civics, the mother and interested citizen – need to know about the way government works in order to feel more knowledgeable, to be empowered to participate, and to hold government accountable?

The folks at the National Academy of Public Administration who are managing the White House's Open Government Initiative brainstorm site have posted a call to participants for help. Specifically, help in voting down "postings you feel are counterproductive to maintaining a free-flowing exchange of ideas" and help in flagging content "that you feel is duplicative or inappropriate to the discussion."

While the post speaks only in general terms, it's clear that it's a reaction to the flood of posts in recent days from people raising questions about President Obama's birth certificate and his eligibility to be president (whom I derisively referred to as the "birthers.")

It looks like people in the Middle East wonder whether President Barack Obama, who is visiting their country later this week to make what is being billed as a historic address to the world's Muslims, is himself a Muslim. A lot more than Americans do, at the moment. Check out what happens if you start searching on Google for "Obama" after telling the search engine that your "region" is Egypt...

Right now, the Open Government Dialogue created as part of the Obama administration's new initiative to engage the public in a participatory discussion of ways to make the federal government more transparent and collaborative looks like it is being overrun by the so-called "birthers"--conspiracy nuts who think the President isn't legitimately a U.S. citizen. Here's a screenshot of recent tweets from @ogovbrainstorm, which automatically shows which ideas have recently gotten 20 positive votes or more...