• NASA scientists, engineers, and astronauts have gathered in the Arizona desert, and are tweeting.
• Salsa's online fundraising and emailing platform went down again earlier this week, bringing down with it, it seems, a number of sites and web pages on the left, including those of the DSCC and Alan Grayson. Salsa's blaming their ISP. Back in May, I wrote about problems with keeping Salsa up and running, and at the time, their COO told me that they were working on making their connection to the Internet redundant: "We'll be in a situation where if there was a second interruption there would be no interruption to our customers. We're working until it's done, and we're not stopping until it's done."
• Code for America, OpenPlans, and the City of DC's CTO office have teamed up to launch Civic Commons.
• Mapping giant ESRI announces that they're making their software free for non-profits, so that folks might make use of open government's data bounty.
• Something happened on Daily Kos involving Rand Paul and anonymous commenting, but I'm really not sure what.
• In a war of words over allegations of carpetbagging, an NRCC press aide tweets out the home addressess of aides to Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA).
• Here's where you go to ask Bill Clinton a YouTube question.
• And ProPublica launches Nerd Blog, a safe space for its in-house "programmer-journalists."

If you're a government data geek, you'll want to check out the above presentation where Douglas Hassebrock of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (as in, the Recovery.gov folks) and Alex Fishman from a company called Palantir, made up of vets from PayPal and Stanford, have built out a system for the Obama administration that blends tips from the public, government contracting data, news accounts, mapping, and networking principles to tease out non-obvious relationships that might suggest fraud in the spending of the more than $800 billion in stimulus spending. Intriguing stuff.

Some context for the news that the State Department's Jared Cohen is indeed headed to Google: frequent critic Evgeny Morozov homes in on the question of whether the benefits for free expression associated with tech companies like Google and Twitter is what separates "21st Century Statecraft" from a long history of the U.S. government support for American companies doing profitable business all over the world, including trouble spots like Iran.

FCC.gov, as it exists today

Dan McSwain was an email writer for the Obama campaign, and he's now putting in time in remaking the website of the Federal Communications Committee, FCC.gov, a site that is now, by general consensus, almost remarkably bad, a site where "user-friendly" means press releases offered in two different awkward formats, PDF and Microsoft Word. Filings before the commission on their incredibly important work are extraordinary difficult to find. It is, frankly, ugly, looking more like a long-forgotten site map than the full-fledged website of a major government agency. FCC staffers like to joke that their site is cutting-edge, as long as you allow that the time period you're taking about is the year 2000.

McSwain and others inside the commission know that the site needs a great deal of TLC before its relaunch, planned to happen by the end of the year. Yesterday at the Gov 2.0 conference, FCC Managing Director Steven VanRoekel, who runs the commission on a day-to-day basis, jokingly demoed a new version of the site that was an exact replica of the current site, except that the logo was now an animated .gif. Hearts were heard breaking throughout the auditorium. Your faithful writer might have teared up, just a little bit.

McSwain, more seriously, walked me through some of the thinking and processes driving the redesign of the Federal Communications Commission's web presence...

It's official: the State Department's Jared Cohen, closely identified with the idea of "21st Century Statecraft," is indeed leaving the department's Policy Planning staff to head up a new "think/do tank" division called Google Ideas. Foreign Policy has an interview with Cohen on his next steps, and four years at State.

Cohen says that the model for Google Ideas is being built around his time at State, including the "SWAT-team model of building teams of stakeholders with different resources and perspectives to troubleshoot challenges."

Last June, Peter Levin was pulled from the private sector into the Department of Veterans Affairs (a.k.a. the VA) to figure out how the agency could harness technology to better serve the country's many veterans. While on stage yesterday afternoon at the Gov 2.0 conference, Levin made the case that among the most resonant things he's done thus far was to revamp the department's website, VA.gov, into something more modern, more in keeping with the times. "You'd be surprised about the impact on confidence and morale," explained Levin, "both inside and outside the agency." When it comes to the struggle to innovate from inside government, it's a reminder, perhaps, that very often your first audience is sitting inside your own building.

• Nate Silver looks at what candidates' websites are telling voters about the issues they're campaigning on.
• Fidel Castro loves him some World Wide Web.
• Erick Erickson admits that he thinks the political right in America lags behind the left when it comes to building a widely-beneficial tech infrastructure, writing by way of example, "the left has Act Blue and the right has . . . well . . . had a variety of ultimately failed platforms."
• But a bright spot for the GOP, perhaps, is YouTube: making the case that campaigning Republicans are getting the attention there.

Meet Challenge.gov. The Obama administration issued a call back in March for its composite angencies to considering using prizes and challenges to spur innovation, through, goes the thinking, greater collaboration between government and citizenry, motivated by a little cash money, in the spirit of private sector experiments like the X Prize. Formally launched today by Obama administration officials, Challenge.gov is intended to be a free and easy platform that federal agenices can use, said GSA's Bev Godwin, to "post challenges in literally a matter of minutes."

U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, at Gov 2.0 this afternoon, talked about Challenge.gov as part and parcel of the White House's push to use technology to open up the federal government. "This is a fundamental shift in power," said Kundra. "This engages the American people as co-creators in solving some of the toughest problems this country faces."

There's some meta collaboration at work in the platform itself. Godwin's General Services Administration handled navigating the "compliance minefield" so that individual agencies don't have to worry quite so much about breaking any laws, or stepping outside the bounds of government restrictions on privacy and more. But the technology of the platform itself comes via a company called ChallengePost.

Of course, adoption here is key. U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra told the crowd that among the biggest fans of prizes and competitions inside the Obama administration is Michelle Obama, the First Lady. Her "Let's Move" campaign is, for example, running on the brand-new platform, in conjunction with the USDA, a contest that awards some $12,000 for the best healthy recipes that might appeal to children. Of higher stakes is the Department of Energy's "Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize." Ten million dollars is up for grabs for those who come up with ideas for workable cars that excel on a new metric that they're calling MPGe, or Miles per Gallon or (sustainable) Energy Equivalent.

Elsewhere during their time on the Gov 2.0 stage, Kundra and Chopra described how the Obama administration is forging new ground when it comes to figuring out how to use incentives to help the federal government do more, better. OMB's IT Dashboard, for example, said Kundra, aims to expose how much government technology projects cost, and how well they're working. Those IT investments that aren't up to snuff, goes the thinking, are ruthlessly cut. Kundra bragged on the cancellation of several federal IT projects, ended because the data exposed them as hopelessly deficient. It's a matter, explained Kundra, of applying "the same Darwinian pressure" that rules the consumer IT world to the federal IT space. Game on.

*A belated note on disclosure: PdF's Andrew Rasiej is an investor in ChallengePost, a New York-based company mentioned in the above post.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski just ceded the Gov 2.0 stage at the Grand Hyatt Washington to Steve VanRoekel, a former Microsoftie now serving as the commission's geeky managing director, so that VanRoekel could describe a much anticipated redesign of the criminally horrendous and user-unfriendly FCC.gov that, in his telling, will focus on publishing more and better data about broadcast licensing, broadband access, and other areas under the agency's purview. The new FCC.gov is expected to launch by the end of the year, the site's first redesign in ten years.

VanRoekel ran through slides describing new additions to the FCC website, including an API that opens up data on broadcasting licenses (tied to single registration numbers that make clearer which companies and interests own which TV and radio stations across the country) and access to the data collected by the agency's testing of home broadband speeds. New as well: FCC.gov/developer. Judging from VanRoekel's slides, the new FCC.gov site's look at feel will mimic that of Broadband.gov.

If VanRoekel's presentation is reflective of reality, the FCC has made an interesting choice -- focusing on developers, and the numbers and hard data that they hunger for, rather than on making it easier for average folks to find information, and deliver input, on the incredibly important work the FCC does to shape the modern media landscape in communities across the United States.

Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson

I just tracked down HHS's Chief Technology Officer Todd Park after his talk here at Gov 2.0 to press him for details on adding pricing data to the Obama administration's HealthCare.gov.

Park demurred a bit on the details, other than to say that the process is moving along, and the agency is in the midst of parsing the data sent in by health insurers. Hard numbers on how much health care plans cost is supposed to be added to the site by October 1st, less than a month away. The red flag for cynical sorts, though, is that there's little stick goading American health insurers into handing their internal pricing data over to Uncle Sam. They're free to make the judgment that it's not worth it.

The carrot? "It's really the fact that they're going to have their data on this highly-regarded site," said Park.

In order to have that be much of an incentive, it seems, you probably need to have some pretty wide-spread adoption of the site by Americans looking for trusted health information (or, maybe, some investigative reporters taking Aetna or what have you to task for not playing along with the site.) On that point, I asked Park about traffic. HealthCare.gov, he said, "just recently broke a million hits since it launched," which happened in July.

There have been improvements to the site since that launch, pointed out Park, including the addition of a Dialysis Facility Compare tool and help bubbles that pop up over words that might be unfamiliar to users. Congress mandated the creation of the site with the passage of the health reform legislative package.