Credit: WhiteHouse.gov

Way back when, when we first started discussing what a smart, savvy, modern, wired, and engaged Obama White House would look like, someone in these parts (okay, was me) suggested that one of the things that the Internet might be great at is directly connecting the American people with not only the President, but the subject-matter experts and point people buried within the administration who really do hold answers to questions on how the government does its thing day-in-and-out. The web could, the thinking goes, flatten that administrative hierarchy in a way that might be useful, ultimately making government more accessible and inclusive.

Say you want to know what's really going on behind this morning's news that we've scrapped a long-controversial national animal ID tracking program. Your best bet isn't going to be Obama or Robert Gibbs. If you're the sort of person who cares about food safety agricultural monitoring (a slice of people that ranges to farmers to students to researchers to activists), then you're going to want to hear details from someone at, say, USDA. If you can find someone who actually knows about program and can explain the competing interests that went into the reversal. We might come away actually knowing something more about how farm policy works in the U.S. It might be wonderful.

Anyway, that's a long lead-in just to point you to the news that, as the Hill's Kim Hart reports, the White House has announced a second bite at the 14,000 YouTube questions that came in after Obama's State of the Union address. This time, the official answerees are policy staffers from the Domestic Policy Council, the National Economic Council, and the National Security Council. It starts in just about ten minutes, at 12:45pm EST, and you can watch it here.

Update: The staffers doing the answering will, it turns out, be the Domestic Policy Council's Heather Higginbottom, the National Economic Council's Brian Deese, and the National Security Council's Ben Rhodes.

Because who would attend a "Summit on Customer Service," even if it was at the White House?

Today the White House bought together a bevy of CEOs to Washington to a forum on the somewhat sexier Forum on Modernizing Government. The Obama Administration wants to know what business knows about serving customers and clients, and streamlining operations. "Those are well known sciences" in the business world, promised Whirlpool CEO Jeff Fettig at the event, the opening and closing sessions of which were held in a small auditorium on the ground floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on a surprisingly spring-like January day in Washington.

The CEOs in attendance represented companies both long established and somewhat newer. In addition to Whirlpool's Fettig, the generally dark-suited crowd included Craig of Craigslist and Angie of Angie's List, as well as executives from Alcoa and Adobe, Microsoft and Trader Joe's, Southwest Airlines and Yelp. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer held animated conversations in the aisles as attendees moved between sessions. Their counterparts in government were in plentiful attendance too. Seated just in front ahead of me and to the direct right of Facebook's Chris Hughes was U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, and to Kundra's right, U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra. When Kundra and Chopra were joined on stage during the day's closing session by U.S. Chief Performance Office Jeffrey Zients, a Defense Department official made the crowd laugh by saying that the panel resembled "sort of the male version of The View."

And then there was Barack Obama...