As part of their on-going series of many-to-one sit downs with government leaders that casts Steve Grove as the avatar for thousands of Americans, YouTube sat down with the Federal Communications Commission chair Julius Genachowski yesterday, the same day that Genachowski's FCC released Connecting America, its long-awaited National Broadband Plan:

At 35 minutes and consisting of 17 questions that poured in from the public through Google Moderator, the chat is a condensed look at how this FCC is looking at the Internet as an essential component of American life. Genachowski tackled the big questions, from what the government plans to do about the coming wireless spectrum crunch to the near-total lack of competition on the backbones of American communications infrastructure that leaves many Americans either paying too much for broadband, or unable to get broadband at all -- and thus, unable to participate in things, like, say, a YouTube chat with the chairman of the FCC.

Grove, who is getting the hang of acting as the medium for the public's questions, introduced a fun feature called FCCaesar That's a play on both Genachowksi's first name, and, it seems, the fact that the chair is the executive branch's top dog on telecommunications. Genachowski played along, running through a series of strong questions by giving them a thumbs up/thumbs down, and sticking admirably to a sentence or two description of just why he felt the way he did on the topic at hand.

Also tackled: the traditional mediocrity (and we're being kind) of the Federal Communications Commission's online presence. It's a favorite obsession in these parts. Genachowski, it seems, shares that focus. "One of the things I'll tell you is that we inherited a website that won an award in the 1980s," he told Grove, "and that probably wasn't updated since." Ouch! He went on. "We have just a terrific new media team, kind of a SWAT team of really committed folks who are working on upgrading our operations. They've done an incredible job. If you go to Reboot.FCC.gov, it's actually a place where you can participate in our effort to re-craft a website that really works in an Internet era." Relatedly, the release of the National Broadband Plan yesterday was coupled with the rollout of a brand new Broadband.gov site, meant to act as a hub for what will hopefully be a continuing robust discussion about the role of the government in connecting America.

It has been suggested by-I-won't-say-whom that our dear readers here are techPresident are exactly the sort of smart, tech-savvy, with-it people who should be asking Julius Genachowski questions in next week's YouTube conversation with the Federal Communications Commission chair. You know the drill. Submit questions through Google Moderator, and then get other people to vote it up.

The timing is pretty exquisite; the interview is happening next Tuesday, March 16th, which happens to be the very same day that the FCC is releasing its much anticipated national broadband strategy. Of course, it might have been more constructive if we had a chance to read the thing first, but you can prep yourself with these background materials.

Just after last Thursday's health care summit at Blair House, the folks at YouTube corralled three of Congress' top officials -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid -- and had them answer, on video, the same five questions from the public that had been bubbled up to the top of the project using Google Moderator. Why mandates? Is health insurance a right? What effect does the threat of malpractice have? Why not do away with tying health insurance to employers, as well as to geography?

A neat aspect of the exercise is that the five citizen-submitted questions gave the Democrats and Republican involved rather specific pegs on which to hang their answers, but how the member dealt with producing the video response was up to them. (YouTube says that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was invited to participate, but declined.) All three members host their video responses on their YouTube channels, and, for example, while Pelosi was seated at a table and reading from a Mac, Reid was addressing the camera from what is either a library or an otherwise book-heavy room, and Boehner was clearly in an admittedly drab House office space.

Of course, setting doesn't matter as much as responses, and we'll let you be the judge of those. Pelosi's, Reid's, and Boehner's videos are after the jump. But the YouTube post-summit experiment is encouraging in that it gives the fractured public discourse around health care some public concerns to pivot around while resisting the urge to force ornery Hill offices into a more regimented practice. Have a look...

After this morning, I'm rooting for someone to suggest earmarking funds for airplane maintenance during today's bipartisan health care summit at Blair House between members of Congress of both parties and President Obama. I spent four hours sitting on a runway at JFK airport because some dashboard light either wouldn't go on or wouldn't go off. No take-off meant no in-flight wifi (and thus no blogging). Still, I was able to track the progress of the health care come-together fairly well just by getting online via my iPhone. That's because coverage of the summit's start came in a multitude of channels, from live blogging to live tweeting to online chats and more.

Whatever might come out of today's group therapy session in terms of legislative progress, it's probably fair to say that progress on another front is unavoidable: how those inside, outside, and around government learn to navigate the stream of information made possible by the real-time web. Here's a quick look at how people from all corners are -- in the context of today's bipartisan health reform summit in Washington -- experimenting with disseminating, annotating, and analyzing the stream of information we're able to access about what government looks like today...

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.

It's like Chicago 10, but it got made a lot quicker. Remember how the Supreme Court ruled that California's Northern District court wasn't allowed to broadcast video footage from the Prop 8 trial taking place in San Francisco? Mashable has the story of a pair of filmmakers who have thought up a workaround. Using court transcripts, they're recreating the trial and posting it all to YouTube. In the interest of creating an unbiased record, they are reportedly using actors of equal physical attractiveness to portray each side. (No word on whether, in real life, the pro- and anti- same sex marriage forces involved in the trial are equally as good looking.)

Here's a creative use of new media to put a new spin on local politics, coming to us from Skagit County in northwest Washington State. A group of activists is shining light on what goes down in county business meetings by condensing video posted by the country from each of their long administrative sessions, boiling them into bite-sized YouTube clips of a few minutes each. Writes one of the people behind the project, "Skagit County has a history of good ol' boy bully politicians who do all they can to take care of their friends and remain in office." Here's more from the Skagit County activist:

Located only 50 miles north of Seattle, the county is on grow [sic] and gaining progressive young professionals who sit on the sidelines shaking their heads. The County records their meetings and posts them on their web site at skagitcounty.net and we are not infringing on copyright by reposting elements of the meetings on youtube.com.

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We track decisions made as best we can and assemble them into concise youtube clips to help the public better understand what and when decisions were made, and how the process went down.

While few people from Skagit might have the stamina or ability to sit through a full session, they can get the scoop by watching things like "Solid Waste Self Haul 100% Minimum Rate Increase," a two minute YouTube clip. That recent decision-making process on flouridating the Skagit County water supply? Down to five minutes.

Today's YouTube event at the White House, starring President Obama, CitizenTube director Steve Grove, and a bunch of user-generated questions from the public, has to be judged a success, in my view.

Years back, when I bought a house, someone gave me a piece of advice. Though I don't remember exactly who it was, I remember the guidance well. Don't pick a paint color by committee. You'll end up with a shade that doesn't particularly appeal to anyone.

I'm reminded of that today having just finished watching the White House's Open for Questions session where questions came in for the President through YouTube and Google Moderator. It's not a perfect fit. Some of the questions were very appealing to the people who submitted them. But while the project was intriguing, innovative, and exciting in concept, in execution it turned out that very few of the questions-via-YouTube got at topics that Obama hasn't addressed, repeatedly, in some other venue. The biggest winners today, perhaps, were the advocacy groups who got their questions into the dozen or so ones asked by YouTube news and politics editor Steve Grove to Obama.

There was a brief flurry of excitement when one of the early questions appeared to ask a question about hemp. But it turned out, in the end, that he was talking about HAMP -- HUD's Home Affordable Modification Program...

Grab yer popcorn. Obama's Open for Questions session, drawn from questions posted to YouTube, is about to begin (1:45pm EST). Watch here or here.