Over on USA.gov, they're running an interesting dialogue about how to improve the site, which is a primary portal for citizens seeking all kinds of information from government. (Compete.com says USA.gov averages just under a million unique visitors a month.)

Over on O'Reilly Radar, Carl Malamud has a chat with Federal Register director Ray Mosley and the Government Printing Office's Michael Wash, based on questions on the new Federal Register in XML that Malamud collected from the various folks on the Internet. If the nuances of SGML to XML conversion strike you as the most exciting thing in the world, than this is the chat for you.

But what's really powerful here is that this sort of conversation is happening at all. Government officials make what's really a technocratic change to an obscure government process and then go right to advocates, interested bloggers, and the public to hash over the details? Participatory government in action, folks, or at least one style of it .

Oh, and there's a bit of new news in the interview: the Federal Register will soon be available through RSS, so you can get nearly real-time feeds of the data.

Clearly, President Obama thrilled the team over at the Office of Science and Technology Policy yesterday when, in a forceful speech at the National Academy of Sciences about "restoring science to its rightful place," the president gave sizable props to what the OSTP has just started attempting to do online in inviting public input on the new executive order on scientific integrity that he's ordered written. The Office of Science and Technology Policy is, of course, home to the newly appointed CTO and is also the nesting ground for well known advocates for open government like Beth Noveck and Susan Crawford. (Argh. Crawford is actually with the National Economic Council, not OSTP. Regret the error.) Here's the part of Obama's remarks that must have spread huge smiles on the faces of the folks there:

As part of this effort, we've already launched a web site that allows individuals to not only make recommendations to achieve this goal, but to collaborate on those recommendations. It's a small step, but one that's creating a more transparent, participatory and democratic government.

Only thing better would have been the President spelling out the URL: Log on to double-you, double-you, double-you... (Raise your hand if you've ever sat on the edge of your seat, hoping against hope that your boss would remember to mention your URL -- and get it right.) Obama's quote was smacked up on the brand spanking new OSTP blog in, I'm guessing, about 12 seconds.

Over on blog.ostp.gov, they're asking for comments on how to flesh out the six big principles that the executive order on scientific integrity will cover:

• The selection and retention of candidates for science and technology positions in the executive branch should be based on the candidate’s knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity.
• Each agency should have appropriate rules and procedures to ensure the integrity of the scientific process within the agency.
• When scientific or technological information is considered in policy decisions, the information should be subject to well-established scientific processes, including peer review where appropriate, and each agency should appropriately and accurately reflect that information in complying with and applying relevant statutory standards.
• Except for information that is properly restricted from disclosure under procedures established in accordance with statute, regulation, Executive Order, or Presidential Memorandum, each agency should make available to the public the scientific or technological findings or conclusions considered or relied on in policy decisions.
• Each agency should have in place procedures to identify and address instances in which the scientific process or the integrity of scientific and technological information may be compromised.
• Each agency should adopt such additional procedures, including any appropriate whistleblower protections, as are necessary to ensure the integrity of scientific and technological information and processes on which the agency relies in its decisionmaking or otherwise uses or prepares.

Obama's full remarks from the NAS speech are well worth a read. As Amy Sullivan notes over at Time, few things seem to raise the presidential dander like the idea that science isn't the proper pursuit of government, and that the United States should shy away from scientific exploration because of fuzzy fears over monkey-human hybrids. He seems personally offended. Take this line, for example: "To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy. It is contrary to our way of life." And he even admiringly quotes Vannevar Bush! Dude is trolling for our geek love pretty hard.

What with the Recovery.gov IT online forum likely to get some attention in good government circles this week, now is as good a time as any to bring up an alternative model the Danish people seem to be having some success with. The Danish Consensus Conference model, as I understand it, pairs a group of topic-matter experts with a collection of interested lay people to reach an understanding about the "public" view of the technical topic at hand -- on everything from, say, infertility to public transportation. The citizens' panel is made of people who respond to newspaper and other advertisements and are willing to give up to preparatory weekends and three weekends to the conference itself.

Think of it like voluntary jury duty, with an especially geeky aspect...

So much of the focus in open government circles of late has been on political transparency, but staffers from 23 different federal agencies (EPA, CDC, DOE, FEMA, NIH, FERC, Park Service, and more) recently gathered in Washington DC to brainstorm on that lower-profile aspect of open government: tackling the challenge of engaging the American people in their democracy. The conference convened by AmericaSpeaks, Demos, Harvard's Ash Institute, and others produced a 51-page report that lists seven solid suggestions from how to get from where we are today to a more participatory future:

1. Develop a high-level, inter-agency governance structure for implementing the Open Government Directive.
2. Establish systems that will support government-wide adoption of participation and collaboration practices.
3. Demonstrate the value of participation through highly visible Presidential initiatives.
4. Respond to the barrier that public and stakeholder participation are not valued inside agencies.
5. Ensure that participation and collaboration activities are adequately funded.
6. Address institutional barriers that reward the status quo.
7. Address existing rules and regulations that impede participation and collaboration.

Details on each recommendation are in the report (pdf).