Behind closed doors, a solution on transparency

• Obama sent a decisive message on his commitment to transparency, Politico reported today.

  Following outcry from the White House Correspondents Association about a lack of access to the president during his recent vacation, and after an extensive cri-de-coeur from Politico itself about President Barack Obama's low-touch media strategy, the president swiftly responded to his critics.

  He held a private meeting with reporters from major print and television outlets — off the record.

  The web publication's pouty kicker: "POLITICO was not invited to the meeting, though it has been invited to similar off-the-record meetings in the past."

• The Project on Government Oversight comments, in a post on the administration's sluggish response to Freedom of Information Act requests:

  The federal government has a FOIA problem: there is far too much secrecy. Many agencies have failed to fulfill the Obama Administration’s mandate to adopt a “presumption of openness.” There has been no grand shift toward a culture of releasing information proactively—before a FOIA request is made. The system remains broken, and backlogs continue to grow.

"Leaning" on Sheryl Sandberg

• The New York Times offers a critical look at Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's plan to create a "social movement" around women in the workplace:

  “I always thought I would run a social movement,” Ms. Sandberg, 43, said in an interview for “Makers,” a new documentary on feminist history.

  And yet no one knows whether women will show up for Ms. Sandberg’s revolution, a top-down affair propelled by a fortune worth hundreds of millions on paper, or whether the social media executive can form a women’s network of her own. Only a single test “Lean In Circle” exists. With less than three weeks until launch — which will include a spread in Time magazine and splashy events like a book party at Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s home — organizers cannot say how many more groups may sprout up.

What's next for Obama's technology experts?

• Startups, vacations, and, for some, more time in public service:

  With the campaign behind them, Obama for America Technology alumni are scattered across the country — some still in Chicago, some making a new start in a new city, others still taking time off for travel. In interviews, some of these coders, designers, and product managers said that the campaign was a political break in a career otherwise spent in the tech sector. Others told me their time working for Obama has convinced them to focus on civic life. All of them expressed a connection to their campaign colleagues and to OfA's test-everything, data-driven organizing ethos that, they say, is likely to inform everything they do next.

Around the web

• Don't miss Julia Wetherell's look at how a recent ad campaign shows the next set of challenges on the horizon for people who hope crowdfunding brings new ammunition in the fight between grassroots activists and corporate interests.

• Open North is hoping to crowd-fund a new website to make Toronto's city government easier to understand and engage with.

• The Department of Health and Human Services has upgraded its website.

• The Sunlight Foundation has a quick hit visualizing spending around gun legislation.

• Tomorrow is Open Data Day.

• Open Data Day will feature many hackathons. What are hackathons? Former Code for America fellow Alan Palazzolo says, "Hackathons are community building events." We agree — it's the explanation we've heard the most often from people who frequently host these weekend-long programming sessions, and it's the explanation that most closely corresponds with our own observations covering or hosting these events for the past several years.

• Federal lawmakers are defending government standards for sharing personally identifiable data.

• The European Union has launched a new data portal.

• TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington complains that the Department of Homeland Security "stole my boat" as he tried to import it from Canada.

• Public service announcement: There's a new update out for TextWrangler, First POST's OS X text editor of choice. (Via Glenn Fleishman)

• North Korea is preparing to offer mobile Internet access to visitors.

• Internet Archive employees are asking for donations in Bitcoin.

• The Pew Internet and American Life project released more statistics on digital politics as part of Social Media Week.