Some big names in social media are using their online networks to draw attention to the problem of malaria's devastating effects in much of the world, all part of a UN initiative:

Today, United Nations Special Envoy for Malaria, Ray Chambers, announced the formation of a Social Media Envoy group chartered with inspiring and activating social media audiences throughout the year in support of malaria control. The Social Media Envoys are dedicated to utilizing their social profile to keep online and offline media audiences focused on the movement, milestones and resources required to achieve the Secretary-General’s goal of providing all endemic African countries with malaria control interventions by the end of 2010.

“In our efforts to reach the Secretary-General’s 2010 goal of universal bed net coverage, and to reach the longer term goal of near-zero deaths from malaria by 2015, it is critical that acceleration continue in the malaria control movement,” said Ray Chambers, United Nations Special Envoy for Malaria. “Social media content and user driven syndication have proven to be exceptional media assets in generating action behind, elevating awareness of, and increasing resources for global malaria efforts. With our malaria-related objectives within sight, this influential group of Social Media Envoys will help us exceed our awareness goals throughout the year.”

The Social Media Envoys have agreed to take one social action, such as a tweet on Twitter or wall post on Facebook, in support of malaria control each month for 12 consecutive months. The first organized social action from this group will take place on World Malaria Day, April 25, 2010. The Social Media Envoys have been selected by the Special Envoy for Malaria due to the influence, size and engagement of their Social Web and broadcast audiences.

The "Social Media Envoys" for malaria include Cory Booker, Anderson Cooper, Guy Kawasaki, Ryan Seacrest, and Biz Stone. Mayor Booker, for one, has already fulfilled his quota for this month, tweeting out to his million-plus followers, "Every 30 seconds a child dies of MALARIA, this is a statistic we plan to change" -- with a link back to the press release announcing the social media envoy program. (via @KateatState)

If you've heard of Tim Walz, and you're not a Minnesotan, there's a good chance that it's because he's the geography teacher-turned-member of Congress whose class experiment seemed to predict the Rwandan genocide.

Now Walz is putting a little bit of that creativity and collaborative thinking to work on Capitol Hill. Last Friday, Walz, who represents Minnesota's 1st District as a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, posted online the 98 different applications for earmarks received by his office.

For one week, he's asking the people of his district to help him vet the applications, running the gamut from a "new aerial port facility" for the 934th Airlift Wing, worth $7.7 million, to half a million dollars for dental care for the underserved and uninsured people of southern Minnesota. He's asking that they judge the projects based on accountability, impact, and the level of public support they would receive.

"We cannot fund all of these projects," reads a Walz press release, "so I am counting on southern Minnesotans to take some ownership of the important decisions I will soon be making on their behalf."

CNN Finds Video of Drunken Man, Thinks All of America Should Know

If, somehow, you're of the opinion that that's not actual news, and that the constant loopy of such content is strangling our democracy, then do we have the site for you.

Free Press, the Massachusetts-based media reform organization, has launched MediaFail.com, an experiment in online participatory advocacy. Think of it as a 2.0-ing of Atrios' Wanker of the Day, at least in the early going, when Duncan Black hit again and again on bad political reporting in the media. Free Press has added an architecture to what Black did and made it a group project. No one man can identify all the dumb things in the news, it seems.

The way Free Press' Media Fail site works is that anyone can submit a video clip of the potentially offending news story or a text link to an egregious print piece. (Additional submissions, for example, include Tonight Show Adds Laugh Track to Sarah Palin Appearance and Fox "News" FAIL: Jersey Women are not Really Italian.) The site builds a layer on top of the web, simply linking to off-site content and adding a "hat" back to the Media Fail site a la something like Ow.ly. From there, it gets collaborative. Volunteers can vote to "FAIL" entries, and the ones judged most bad bubble up the top of the home page.

What makes the site potentially very powerful is that, from there, those clips can ripple out through the blogosphere -- and even onto that night's Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann hour.

Credit: Gavin Newsom's Office

We mentioned yesterday that White House CIO Vivek Kundra winged his way out to San Francisco to stand beside that city's mayor Gavin Newsom and discuss an Open 311 API, but it's well worth going into more detail on what yesterday's event signified.

For starters, the "Open 311" drive is a push to develop a standardized, interoperable platform for municipal 311 services through the creation of a common API. 311, if you're not familiar, are non-emergency numbers where citizens might report a pothole on their commute or dead street light near their house. (You can't, at least not successfully, use 311 in New York City to ask just which fast food chain offers the Fishamajig sandwich, as a friend found out. But that's a different story.) According to the Washington Post, 311 began in Baltimore in the mid-'90s, with its genesis as an idea out of the Clinton Administration.

Now the Obama Administration is seeking to upgrade 311 for the 21st century.

But it's worth noting what the White House's role is here. Some reporting to the contrary (for example), yesterday's event was not some sort of official launch of a White House Open 311 National Initiative™. But that may well be a great thing...

Credit: SnowmageddonCleanup.com

Check out SnowmageddonCleanup.com. Built on the Ushahidi platform, the new hub is meant as a way for the residents of the snow-bound District of Columbia to come together and shovel one another out of the great snowfall of '1o.

As more an more of these projects emerge that bring new tech solutions to enduring human problems -- our own (and others') humble Vote Report, Haiti disaster relief efforts, Ushahidi's own work at election protection and humanitarian efforts all over the world -- it's looking more and more like the question of how successful they'll ultimately be doesn't really hinge on how good the technology is. In many ways, those nuts have been cracked, at least sufficiently crudely. Instead, whether these innovations will fulfill their potential seems to depend on whether they can get adopted by their target audiences, which often means convincing groups like the Red Cross, for example, to weave these new tools into their own approaches to crisis situations. That can be a challenge, no doubt.

Here, though, there are a few factors working in the apps favor. For one thing, DC is a teeny city, and news can spread pretty quickly, at least in some neighborhoods and areas. And the need is great -- there aren't that many snow shovels to go around.

British Columbia's provincial government says that the Water Act-- written in 1909 to govern the authorities' administration of the province's aquifers, lakes, streams, and other fresh water sources -- is in need of a serious upgrade. The western Canadian province's population shifts and growing economy, compounded by the effects of climate change, are making the old legislation obsolete.

And so, British Columbia is attempting to create a public conversation around a "Living Water Smart" plan, aimed at channeling the needs and desires of the province's more than 4 million residents concerning what to do now with their shared water resources.

The public haggling over British Columbia's water use plan is an intriguing effort worth keeping an eye on (though, of course, it would take knowing more than, well, nothing, about B.C.'s internal politics to really get a handle on the genuine ambitions and potential of this effort). The recent record doesn't reflect too many successful attempts by governments anywhere, really, to formulate contentious, targeted public policy with a healthy dose of web-enabled public engagement. In the B.C. water case, the process will have to negotiate competing demands, from the needs of the enormous province's agricultural sector to the environmental rights of the its "First Nations." Perhaps figuring out how to best use a public commons is a natural fit for modern participatory politics and the new collaborative digital tools we now have in our toolboxes? We'll see.

British Columbia's project is just getting off the ground. First up, a blog. (Photo credit: bfraz)

So we finally have our hands on the long-awaited Open Government Directive. In just eleven pages, it lays out the Obama Administration's vision for what transparent, participatory, and collaborative government will look like when it is pushed beyond the hub of the Obama White House and out into the many agencies, departments, and offices that make up the United States federal government. This morning's announcement of the 11-page OGD is hugely important in many ways. But none more so than that federal agencies are the places in the United States government where the financial budget and staffing resources to finally put some real meat on the bones of open government. Sixteen-hundred Pennsylvania Avenue might get the bulk of the press, but it's in the extremities of government where much of what shapes the lives of citizens takes places. The tricky part is that with that institutional heft comes a tendency towards stasis. Real change to take place inside those silos of government, agency leadership needs to commit to "changing the default," to borrow a phrase from U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, from closed government to a presumption of openness.

Today's announcement succeeded in fleshing out just what the Obama Administration means when it talks about a new relationship between government and citizens. And some of what's in the OGD is reasonably firm -- concrete milestones and specific requirements that the Office of Management and Budget are imposing on dozens of federal agencies as core expectations baked into their missions. Each federal agency's leadership, for example, will, in 120 days, come up with a detailed Open Government Plan of their own; within 45 days, each department will release three "high-value" data sets in an open format, and appoint an internal point-person to be held accountable (and, presumably, testify before Congress when the time comes).

That said, it became clear during the web chat announcing the plan that the White House is betting some of the Open Government Initiatives success on a cultural revolution to take place inside agencies. The open question on open government: what will it take to get a United States federal government that has a momentum towards secrecy to shift its orientation to one of transparency, participation, and collaboration? Is betting on that shift taking place a reasonable gamble? The OGD marks the start of what will prove to be an intriguing, and important, journey.

First, let's deal with what's actually in the plan...

This is the moment that many of us have been waiting for, for quite some time -- those of us who have seen the dysfunction of government up close, and those of us you have been frustrated by a government that can seem institutionally resistant to meaningful engagement with its citizens. It's Open Government directive release day! Watch the White House's live event here, and join us in our live blog below.

On this, Open Government Directive release day -- a.k.a. Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa for good government geeks -- it's worth taking a look back at the vision for open government that Barack Obama laid out back on January 21st, 2009, with one full day of being president under his belt. Now, "open" might be right in the name of this initiative, but what Obama really described is a three-legged stool, made up of not only government transparency, but also citizen participation and meaningful public collaboration. Publishing structured government data and making government more engaging are not one and and same, and the latter is arguably far more difficult to execute and less amenable to being ordered from on-high, even if it's the President of the United States doing the ordering. So keep a look out for whether the OGD really covers the full breadth of the vision of government transformation described by Obama more than 10 months ago:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.  We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Government should be transparent.  Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.  Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government's effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.

Government should be collaborative.  Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and inpiduals [sic] in the private sector.  Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.

Yeah, folks, we're going there. The White House will be releasing their long-awaited Open Government Directive tomorrow, the plan to make government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative that was called for by President Obama on his first full day in office. It's a big day in this little corner of the universe, so we'll be celebrating the event with a live blog of the proceedings. Tune in to the live video feed of the event, and then stop by here to chat the whole thing over.