Was yesterday's all-day meeting at Blair House on health care reform a success? Well, by one measure, it was a huge success for the White House new media operation, which provided a live web stream to users all over the web. This tweet from new media director Macon Phillips sums it up:

The White House's new media operation has been doing something very well that doesn't often get noticed, and that's completing the circle on their experiments in outreach. Case in point: Obama sat down recently to record responses to three of the hundreds of notes from Africans that poured in through SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and other channels during his trip to Ghana. Worth noting is that the bright idea -- Hey! Let's make it so that anyone in Africa can text the president of the United States! -- isn't automagically paired with the fact that as White House staff you get a chunk of the president's afternoon to do follow-up. It's nice to see that level of buy-in at the highest levels, and a recognition that this is less about experimentation than it is about engagement. (As well as an understanding that parachuting the American president into the sub-Sahara once every four years does not a U.S-Africa relationship make.)

In this video, a sleepy-looking globetrotting president answers three questions as selected by African journalists working in DC: What to do about Africa's brain drain? Woo expats back with opportunities secured by good governance -- i.e. kill the bribe culture, Why Ghana? Its sustaining democracy makes it "superior", and how to grow trade between Africa and the U.S. Put the focus on creating capacity.

That said, it's a mistake to look at these engagements as anything resembling true press outreach. These aren't exactly hard ball questions, and you'll notice that the Internet never gets a follow-up. But by narrowcasting out answers on niche topics, the Obama White House is demonstrating a commitment to using digital tools to do more than just put on a show.

The first half-hour of yesterday's 70-minute presidential health reform event at Northern Virginia Community College was given over to a pair of introduction and then opening remarks from President Barack Obama. The White House collected more than 450 video questions through YouTube in the days leading up to the event. Obama answered three of them. Not many, to be sure. But then again, a total of just eight questions on the proposed overhaul of the American health care system got asked in the hour-plus session, regardless of whether they came by video, via Twitter, or in the flesh...

Taking a close look at the White House, it's not difficult to see that they're fairly quickly shifting focus from the "Why?" aspect of open government -- that is, making the case for why a more participatory, collaborative, and transparent democracy is a positive, progressive development -- to a "So, how exactly do we go about doing this open government thing?" phase. They're setting their mission big. If they ultimately succeeded with even part of what they have in mind, it's probably on the safe side of hyperbolic to say that they would be putting the United States at the leading edge of participatory democracy. Below are a trio of insights from the last few days into what the Obama Administration is thinking, doing, and inviting us to do on the way to a future of more engaged and engageable government...