My trip to Gov 2.0 Camp LA commenced with a comedy of errors: lost luggage, a flooded hotel room and flooded streets due to the rains. After a night of little sleep, I arrived at the BlankSpaces co-working location to the company of like-minded people from diverse professional backgrounds but all joining the search for using technology and innovation to improve government. In camp style, we each used the 3 word model to describe why we were there. I thought the focus really centered around engaging new paradigms since people from government, major corporations, start-ups, film industry and media were all together to learn and share ideas.

While there was no shortage of technical expertise present, most of the concepts discussed spoke to a high level of education and interest in the Gov 2.0 space, with sessions ranging from how to properly define gov 2.0 to specific tactics to use in social media within government. The biggest takeaways from the event: focus on people, build replicable solutions, and engage in expansive, multi-pronged outreach and public awareness campaigns.

Those of us on the West Coast - or who stayed up extra late - were able to catch President Obama's town hall live on TV from China along with the accompanying Twitter chatter. There were some amazing nuggets from the town hall. It provided a genuine dialogue with the president, who opened up on his thoughts on everything from terrorism to the open Internet, but much of that will be lost in the Twitter streams the next day or so because Barack Obama admitted (*gasp*) that he has never used Twitter.

In 2000, candidates used e-mail and websites to transmit their messages online. 2004 introduced political blogs, and in 2008, social media played a major role in the election. As the 2010 election approaches and we look to 2012, what's next?

We submitted a panel to the South by Southwest Interactive Panel Picker process that will delve into this topic. Panelists will be Micah Sifry, Nicco Mele, Giselle Schmitz, Sarah Granger and Nancy Scola.

Yesterday, in the city by the bay, Netroots Nation hosted an information and idea-packed New Media Summit in part to gather Bay Area locals and also to convene progressive activists in preparation for the Netroots Nation conference coming in August.

The half day program, followed by a party, began with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ended with candidate for CA Attorney General, Kamala Harris, and contained some fascinating panels on different aspects of new media in politics and activism. As always, Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) drew interest from the full house, as did Clara Jeffery (Mother Jones), Karl Frisch (Media Matters), Cheryl Contee (Jack & Jill Politics), Gina Cooper (Netroots Nation founder), and speakers from Digg, Facebook and Ning.

Monday at 3:30 at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Nancy Scola and I will be facilitating a Core Conversation entitled "Whitehouse.gov 2.0: Upgrading to Open Source Government." We'll provide an overview of the concepts behind employing open source principles to government through technology and how the new administration is running with their campaign promise to improve government transparency online. Then the majority of the session will comprise a discussion about what participants want to see coming out of government in terms of information, and how people most want to be a part of providing input.

First it was #tcot - a grassroots conservative hashtag organized to get more like-minded people together tweeting about their views on issues and current events. Soon thereafter, #rebelleft and #topprog were launched for progressives - to mixed reviews. A new effort launched late last week, #p2 addresses the challenge of organizing progressives on Twitter in a collaborative nature. Introduced by Jon Pincus and Tracy Viselli, #p2 aims bring together participants from all progressive groups on Twitter - #topprog, #rebelleft, #fem2, #woc and #lgbt as well as the Progressive Exchange community. So far, the shorter #p2 tag is picking up steam, already being used by @huffpost.

Yesterday was challenging for the new Obama administration as two key individuals nominated for appointments removed their names from consideration. I was at the White House asking questions about the plans for the CTO and White House technology. Witnessing the heated afternoon press briefing, there was definitely some pressure being put on the administration to respond about whether they were perhaps moving too quickly on these cabinet and senior appointments.

I asked Nick Shapiro, White House spokesman on technology related topics, whether what we've been hearing about a possibly diminished role of the CTO was true. Essentially the answer is no.

At last year's Personal Democracy Forum conference, Linkfluence gave a remarkable visual presentation about the political web under "Presidential Watch 08." The crowd responded favorably, particularly when we could see spheres of influence like the Obama and McCain websites with respect to progressive and conservative blogs. The data is fascinating to observe. Yesterday in Washington, they gave a similar presentation at the Fem 2.0 conference on the "Feminist web."

As the tech community pored over the new whitehouse.gov site, one of the first subterranean changes noted was that of a file most people would never notice called robots.txt. This file serves as a notice to search robots informing them of what files they should or shouldn't survey. Upon seeing the new version of the file, some noticed that it only had two lines of code excluding robot searches vs. the former whitehouse.gov robots.txt that had nearly 2400 lines of exclude lines by the end of the Bush administration, sparking excitement and controversy over what the change means in terms of government transparency.

As the tech community poured over the new whitehouse.gov site, one of the first subterranean changes noted was that of a file most people would never notice called robots.txt. This file serves as a notice to search robots informing them of what files they should or shouldn't survey. Upon seeing the new version of the file, some noticed that it only had two lines of code excluding robot searches vs. the former whitehouse.gov robots.txt that had nearly 2400 lines of exclude lines by the end of the Bush administration, sparking excitement and controversy over what the change means in terms of government transparency.