As Sarah noted yesterday, the White House website got a facelift at 12:01 yesterday as the typically stuffiness of the White House web site smacked headlong into the calming blues of the Obama campaign/transition sites.

I thought I'd take a moment and share some thoughts.

From a design and technical standpoint, the site is fine. It's fairly light on content (and it's all static), but they're less than 24 hours in, so what can you really expect.

Recognizing that the site is content light, and technically "adequate" what else is there to talk about before they add depth? Well, that leads to most of my discussion...

The Obama Administration took its first major steps toward implementing its promise to make government more open and transparent, with two presidential memoranda covering freedom of information, transparency and open government. The first memo directing all agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure." This is a 180-degree turn from the policies of the Bush Administration. Most interesting for e-democracy fans: The memo says "all agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government."

The second memo reiterates those points, and adds more detail. It calls for information about government operations and decisions to be put online, and urges departments and agencies to get public feedback on the information of the greatest interest to the public. Even more promising, in an explicit tip-of-the-hat to "web 2.0," the memo states...

• It was touch and go there for a while. Would Barack Obama emerge victorious from the first major face-off of his presidency? Would he prevail over the dark forces who sought stifle him? Obama for the win!
• You no doubt heard reports yesterday that new Obama White House staffers were upset to find themselves expected to communicate via smoke signals and semaphore. That's bunk, says former Bush Administration officials...
• Some are grumbling that the 72-hour-old WhiteHouse.gov is a huge disappointment...
• And more.

Does Gordon Brown have a digital trick or two to show President Obama? As change and greater digital access to information come slowly to the U.S. Government, it's more than worthwhile to delve into a newly-released beta report from the British Cabinet Office's Power of Information Task Force, which aims to reinvent the British people's interaction with their government.

Written by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg. the report is wide-ranging and though-provoking - much of it came together on wiki - and its authors explicitly link their work to the theme of American change: "Early signs from the Obama administration in the USA suggest that digital innovators in the Administration are thinking along about re-use of data along the lines above. "

Last week, Secretary Clinton's team at the State Department put up a short post on Dipnote, the departmental blog, asking for suggestions on technology and social media. It asked: "How Might the U.S. Utilize Innovative Technologies To Discuss U.S. Foreign Policy?"

The responses are illuminating and thoughtful, and worth reading by anyone considering the evolution of open government in the digital age.

Washington Post tech reporter Kim Hart, whose piece on Vivek Kundra is probably the defining profile of the former DC CTO, has brought us the latest: Kundra will be appointed by President Obama to the newly-created position of federal Chief Information Officer.

Tim O'Reilly tweeted the news: "Vivek is a rock star!" And now, it seems, he's a rock star with budgetary authority! As Hart has it, the Google-apps loving, happiness-index-embracing, data-democratizing Kundra will have total budgetary authority over the government's technology spending. This supercharged federal Chief Information Officer slot, she writes, will also have the power to kill projects -- no matter where in the bowels of DOD or EPA or DHS they might happen to lurk. And he'll also have the mandate to launch intragovernmental projects where he sees fit. Kundra had been rumored to fill Karen Evans' old e-government administrator slot at the Office of Management and Budget, a job that has been around for decades. As Hart paints it, the federal Chief Information Officer job seems to be a significant increase in the scope of his portfolio and a meaningful boost in institutional authority.

That's a tall order. To slay rogue defense contractors and tame intra-agency IT projects run amok, a CIO would need a strong ally in the White House. Obama, of course, has framed the smart use of connective technologies as not only integral to his style of campaigning campaign style, but a thread running throughout his post-millennium governing ideology. It's good to have a friend in the Oval Office. That said, it's not exactly clear at one point in the process, for example, even a high-profile federal CIO could have dipped his or her fingers into, say, the FBI and said "this $100 million virtual case file system is dead to me. Be gone!"

Hart and others have also reported that the still open position of federal Chief Technology Officer will likely focus on advising the Obama White House on matters of technology policy. The CTO job has been rumored to be housed in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. That office, part of the Executive Office of the President, serves to advise the president on the impact of science and technology on the country.

UPDATE: The White House just sent out a press release confirming Kundra's appointment. Text of the release after the jump.

Sure, it's the New York Times' digital division that gets New York Magazine photo spreads worthy of Hollywood starlets. (Headline: "The Renegades at the New York Times," and I'm assuming I'm not the only one picturing programmers arriving to work at the Times brandishing swords and some sort of face-obscuring masks.) But their colleagues to the south at the Washington Post aren't willing to cede the web so quickly. Check out this new widget on Obama Administration appointments, tracking the 486 Senate-approved positions the new president has to fill. Just 6.7% of the jobs, notes the widget, have been filled thus far. Note the adorably teensy pie charts showing which federal agencies have the most open posts, and the useful gender, ethnicity, age, and connections breakdowns. (You'll be surprised to learn, for example, that 10 of the 43 appointees confirmed thus far either attended Obama's alma mater of Harvard or taught there.) A widget like this might not immediately smack of journalism, but it is a powerful way to tell a cumulative, evolving political story like presidential appointments that's a bit more difficult to serve with the traditional lede-nutgraf-body-kicker article format.

The White House recently took a sizable step in the direction of openness by putting up a handy online form through which anyone can request the financial and ethics disclosure forms for White House officials. Type in the name of an official, and zip! A pdf of the documents is soon waiting in your inbox. But the Internet, she's not so fond of waiting, nor one-off requests. Like OpenCRS did for Congressional Research Service reports, ProPublica is compiling a one-stop shop for those docs. It's a project under the direction of Amanda Michel, ProPublica's new editor of distributed reporting who was formerly with the Huffington Post's Off the Bus.

The White House disclosure forms collected by ProPublica list in which mutual funds officials have money, from where they're collecting paychecks, and other accountings of their assets and income -- distributed out across wide bands of dollar value. The ethics letters detail which stock options they have to give up, boards they have to leave, and consulting shops they have to shutter. Also marked are the notes of "reviewing officials" on whether the official's financial status is on the up and up. Scrawled on the form of one assistant to the president: "Per [illegible] representative, all conflicting stocks have been sold as of 4/1/09."

The Associated Press notes that one step below cabinet-level positions, the Obama Administration has quite a few gaps in its staff line-up. (They've got one particularly striking example in their piece: 19 of the 20 top appointed slots at HHS are being filled by career employees serving in an acting capacity. The 20th slot is open.) Really, though, this is just a lead-in to the point that just under three months into the new presidency, the promised first U.S. Chief Technology Officer has yet to be named. That's not all that surprising, giving the staffing ramp-up of any new administration. But what's more noteworthy is that the considerable chatter and floated names of the administration's early days -- remember the speculation that Steve Jobs was really skipping Macworld because he was prepping for move to the District? -- have quieted to near silence.

The White House is celebrating hitting the 100 day mark by posting a few hundred photos to its Flickr stream, and they offer a peek into what's happening in the Obama White House on a day-to-day basis. It's probably fair to say that, like him or not, there's something humanizing about seeing the president -- and all the president's men and women -- going about the work of the nation and catching the occasional football game in 3D. That, of course, is likely the White House's intention, and it's one of the prime benefits of social media for government actors: we're more reluctant to see people as proper targets of ire and derision when we regularly see them cavorting with puppies, or otherwise acting in ways that are identifiably human.

White House photographer Pete Souza mixes straightforward fare with some rather artistic captures:

This is probably as good a time as any to note that the General Services Administration -- the mechanics of the executive branch, if you will -- has been busy negotiating government-wide terms-of-service arrangements with web services so that every agency and department can post their very own Flickr photosets, YouTube videos, and the like. Having pre-approved services streamlines things when executive branch entities get ready to get 2.0. Get ready for videos of Tom Vilsack hoeing a row or shots of Stephen Chu working out energy-saving algorithms in his DOE office late at night. GSA's latest round of negotiations covers Facebook, MySpace, Blist, AddThis, Vimeo, and Slideshare.