Daily Digest: A President Who Asks for Help

• Obama Keeps Focus on Volunteerism: During the campaign, presidential hopeful Barack Obama put volunteerism front and center -- quite literally, dedicating valuable home page real estate to, for example, calls for help during Hurricane Gustav. The practice helped to define him as a compassionate "brother's keeper" candidate, and President-elect Obama seems intent on taking with him to the White House. Change.gov is today highlighting a plea for help with the fires now ravaging southern California. The call points to CaliforniaVolunteers.org, a well-intentioned but scatter-shot portal created by the California Governor's office. But if Obama keeps his pledge to grow robust Internet-driven volunteerism on the federal level, he might soon be able to both ask Americans to pitch in and help them to do it.

• The Single Worst Thing About the United States Government: <rant>Let's take a brief moment to go on record in opposition to a terrible thing. Click on Change.gov's link to the California volunteerism site, and you'll find yourself face-to-face with one of the dumbest, most archaic things in government today: exit notices that pop up when you move from one website to another. It's 2008. We get that when you click a link to a different website, you end up on a different website! So can we please end the practice already -- perhaps in our new CTO's first hundred days?</rant>

• Is the CTO's Job Description Better Labeled "CIO"?: Speaking of our first national Chief Technology Officer, ZDNet's Richard Komen is asking whether we're not actually talking about a Chief Information Officer -- that is, less a nuts-and-bolts technologist-in-chief and more an executive-minded leader with a vision of how government handles its IT duties. It's a useful question as we try to make sense of this brand new Beltway creature. To be sure, the positions' boundaries are fuzzy even in the private sector, but CTOs are generally are more hands-on while CIOs are more comfortable in the boardroom.

• In the Beginning, There Was Crisis: Speaking of first hundred days, GOOD Magazine's revamped website has a good-looking chart detailing the highs and lows of the opening months of presidential administrations going back to 1933 and FDR's first swearing-in. The visual display suggests that -- from the Bay of Pigs to John Hinckley Jr. to Waco -- American presidents haven't, historically, had much of a honeymoon.

• IP Policy Moves Up to the Big Show: Should the full House okay Judiciary Chairman John Conyers's (D-MI) reorganization plan, so-called intellectual property issues will be bumped up from the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property to the full committee level, reports Ars Technica's Julian Sanchez. (via Martin Bosworth) But, says Sanchez, forget the tempting conspiracy theory that the move is intended to keep IP out of the hands of 'net-friendly Rick Boucher (D-VA); the reshuffling is merely a reflection of how much Congress intends to take up the topic this session. Intellectual property will soon be gaining a bigger stage in the executive branch, too: the PRO IP Act created an "IP Czar," a position that looks likely to be left for Obama to fill.

• Schmidt Answers "What Now?": Eric Schmidt -- CEO of a little company called Google and someone whose name has been bandied about as a possible national CTO -- will be speaking at 1pm ET today at the New America Foundation in DC. The topic is a most CTOish one: how Washington can use technology to spur economic growth and open up government. The event will be webcast, and you can also follow New America's updates of the event on Twitter.

In Case You Missed It...

Guest writer Gong Szeto details his proposal for YourOwnDemocracy.org, his submission to the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge that would "empower citizens of any democracy in the world to directly engage one another and their elected leaders on important issues."

Patrick Ruffini considers MyBarackObama.gov -- shorthand for what we can expect to see from the Obama White House, from comments on Change.gov's blog to advocacy e-mails direct from the Oval Office.

Nancy Scola asks if this past weekend's Join the Impact rallies -- organized almost entirely online -- are helping to bridge the gay-straight gap. And Nancy also outlines OpenCongress's My Political Notebook, a new tool for the political pack rat.

Tom Watson pushes back against the calls for Bill Clinton to be more transparent as his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, is being considered to be the next Secretary of State. Tom points out that the Clinton Global Initiative, one arm of Clinton's sprawling mini-empire, already makes details of its "commitments" available online.

And for our New York-area readers, our Andrew Rasiej will be speaking at New York University, at 3:30pm ET tomorrow on the topic of "Democracy, Civic Action, and Politics in a Networked World." The event is free and open to the public.