Text BABY (English) or BEBE (Spanish) to 511411 and, under a project just announced by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (pdf), parents-to-be will get expert pregnancy and child-care advice from health authorities. Text4Baby is a program organized by the National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition, a group that includes not only the White House OSTP but dozens of local, state, and federal agencies; mobile phone carriers; universities; health-industry companies; and others:

“Text4baby is the first free mobile health service to be taken to scale in the United States,” said Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer for the U.S. Government. “We know that mobile phones hold tremendous potential to inform and empower individuals,” said Chopra. “Text4baby represents an extraordinary opportunity to expand the way we use our phones, to demonstrate the potential of mobile health technology, and make a real difference for moms and babies across the country.”

Chopra may well be right that this is the first time cell phones have been used in a big, big way in the U.S. to distributed health information. In some ways, though, we're playing catch-up; the rest of the world has been busy innovating in this space. For example, in South Africa, Project Masiluleke has been for years using cell phones to ping people with information on tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. A clever part of the Text4Baby approach is that people who sign up for the program will get customized health guidance specifically pegged to their baby's due date, pushed right to their pockets. New parents will continue to get the text messages for a year after the baby's birth.

After that, the kid's expected to get her own cell phone.

If there's one thing that is coming to be a hallmark of the Obama approach to managing government, it may well be this: dashboards. A favorite of the modern business world, computer-based dashboards aim to give executives a glimpse at whether his or her organization's constituent parts are working together to form a smooth-running machine. As quickly as your speedometer or gas gauge tells you what you need to know about your car, a management dashboard is meant to inform the boss about organizational performance.

But when it comes to the U.S. Open Government Dashboard currently in the works at the White House, the "boss" is meant to be you -- an interested public and outside watchdog groups.

Fourteen different federal agencies and departments, from the will have their performances tracked when the open government dashboard goes live, scheduled under the terms of the terms of the President's recently-released Open Government Directive to happen no later than February 6th of 2010. And the White House is looking for helping figuring out just what the dashboard should track. "We need to enlist your help holding 'our feet to the fire,'" blogged Beth Noveck, Deputy U.S. CTO for Open Government. "We are looking for your input about what metrics the Dashboard should measure." The White House is taking comments through the Office of Science and Technology Policy's WordPress blog...

Sure, U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, and White House new media director Macon Phillips come in for a round of Jon Stewart's special blending of mocking. (How many times do you think Chopra's been called "an Indian George Clooney" since this aired?) It's got to ouch a bit. But there's a way to look at it as a very good thing, indeed. Technologists in politics have reached a level of public interest where they're good Daily Show fodder.

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.

U.S. Deputy CIO for open government Beth Noveck surveys the landscape, finding experiments in participatory democracy bubbling up throughout these United States:

Inspired by the President’s call for more open government, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts launched its data catalogue, following in the footsteps of Washington, DC, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere around the country (as well as cities in Canada and the UK), to provide public access to information by and about government. What makes this exciting is not merely having transportation information available in machine-readable formats, but that professional and amateur enthusiasts can then get together, as they did last weekend, to create new software applications and data visualizations to better enable public transit riders to track arrival times for the next subway, bus, or ferry. Publishing government information online facilitates this kind of useful collaboration between government and the public that transforms dry data into the tools that improve people’s lives. (For another great example, check out what happened when we published the Federal Register for people to use.)

The National Association of State CIOs is helping to spur this movement toward greater data transparency at the state level by publishing “Guidance for Opening the Doors to State Data.”

Just as the federal government is using online brainstorming with government employees and the public to generate ideas for saving money or going green, state and local governments are also using new technology to tap people’s intelligence and expertise. The City of Manor, Texas (pop. 5800) has launched “Manor Labs,” an innovation marketplace for improving city services.  A participant can sign up to suggest “ideas and solutions” for the police department, the municipal court, and everything in between. Each participant’s suggestion is ranked and rewarded with “innobucks.” These innobucks points can be redeemed for prizes: a million innobucks points wins “mayor for the day” while 400,000 points can be traded for a ride-along with the Chief of Police.

Exciting stuff, and one tangible outgrowth of President Obama's call for more open government does seem to be the freedom and inspiration it has delivered unto those working at all levels of government. To get at the actual links to the projects and programs Noveck mentions, though, you'll have to click through to her original post. The White House still insists on attaching warning notices to every external link on Obama Administration sites, which messes up the underlying code and makes it more difficult for normal folk to remix and reuse what the White House open government team is putting out into the world. There's an irony in there somewhere...

Reposted from "Increasing Citizen Engagement in Government," the Fall 2009 newsletter from the Center for Intergovernmental Solutions, an office of the General Services Administration.

To be effective, Internet professionals navigate between two dangerous currents: dismissal and utopianism. The challenges of dismissal are pretty obvious—the boss who forgets to invite you to the meeting, or the subtler demotion of online work to a pure marketing function.

The risks of utopianism are harder to see, but the danger is just as great: If we overstate how online tools can change the world, we ask our clients and colleagues to sail on faith into uncharted waters and we risk losing allies in the daily work that makes change a reality over time.

The Obama Administration arrived on a surge of optimism about online partnerships between citizens and government. As excitement transitions into a season of experimentation, Internet professionals, government professionals and regular people face important questions about the readiness of tools, institutions and individuals to turn optimism into operational change.

Beth Noveck, White House Deputy CTO for Open Government, is leading the effort to rethink public participation. She says the administration wants "to make government more relevant to people's lives" by providing more information, and to create "opportunities for people to share their expertise and participate in solving problems." Noveck believes that transparency and participation tools are most powerful when combined. "Data helps to focus people's attention," she says, "to develop actionable proposals based in empirical measures." Noveck and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) have already coordinated web discussions on declassification policy, FCC rules, use of web cookies, Pentagon Web 2.0 guidelines and recommendations on the Open Government Initiative.

Despite the innovation—and fanfare—behind the White House pilots in transparency and public input, leaders in online collaboration temper their enthusiasm with questions.

Think more about technology. And by all means, figure out how we can buy more of it. That's the gentle nudge that Peter Orszag and John Holdren gave federal agencies in a joint memo issued this week.

The directors of the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Office, respectively, asked federal offices to include in their 2011 budget request ideas for how scientific and technological research can confront "four practical challenges" facing the U.S, namely job growth, energy creation, health care, and national security.

What's more, think about playing well with each other, said Orszag and Holdren. In a nod to "today's open innovation model" that's all the rage outside the halls of government, agencies are given notice that "the whole chain from research to application does not have to take place within a single lab, agency or firm." Agencies are prodded to "become highly open to ideas from many players, at all stages."

We like to ask just how, exactly, Vivek Kundra, Aneesh Chopra, and other government technologists-in-residence are going to drag America to a tech-savvy future we talk much about. It's a good question. But this is also one good answer. Take some chunk of the enormous sums of money the U.S. government spends every year and start buying our way there. NextGov's Gautham Nagesh has more.

The congressionally-mandated Public Interest Declassification Board is making use of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's blog to collect public input on government-wide reform of how we approach the classification of information, as part of an attempt to deal with the secrecy-inflation in recent years that has seen every order form for a new carton of printer paper marked "Top Top Secret." At the moment, PIDB is most interested in figuring out whether it would help matters to establish a National Declassification Center. Join the discussion.

Phase III -- the drafting phase -- of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Open Government Initiative (OGI) has begun with a period of collaborative drafting using Mixed Ink, the group writing platform we've touched on here a handful of times in the past. OSTP is asking for open-government recommendations to come in the form of actionable, measurable prescriptions: all agencies should do X, and the metric for success or failure will be Y. The substance seeding this drafting phase is drawn from the suggestions produced during the project's two earlier public phases, as shaped and interpreted by OSTP -- as well as commentary captured from a wiki used by government employees to participate in the process. This is the last of the public phases of the OGI process, but not the last stop on the road: Deputy CTO for Open Government Beth Noveck blogs that what results from the Mixed Ink-powered drafting phase "will inform the drafting of an 'Open Government Directive' to Executive Branch agencies."

Drafting runs through Sunday, while voting on the submitted suggestions continues until Monday, June 30th.