The Cliff Notes Version:
(1) WhiteHouse.gov/TV; (2) Weekly Webcast; (3) GovTube; (4) Put Content on Non-Governmental sites; (5) Create New Media, Transparency, and Technology offices in every executive branch agency; (6) Monthly Department Secretaries webcasts; (7) Webcast the Inauguration; (8) Make the State of the Union an interactive multimedia event; (9) Make the President's Annual Budget a digital, multimedia document; (10) Enact all of this and more first by executive order, then through legislation, so future Administrations can't just hard reboot your digital legacy.

For the full version, read on...

Back in the day, when Yahoo! was the only search game in town, many wondered why Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), and eventually Google would attempt to break into that market. The answer continues to be the same - although they're good, there's still a lot to be done with Search. Contextual search is still being explored, and in terms of government and campaign information, most documents are not publicly or easily available to the search engines. With the goal of open government in mind, I decided to take a look at five relatively new search companies that recently launched sites, hoping that perhaps some of them could help make search of government and campaign data a little better, honing in on the FEC, OMB and more.

The actual contracts used in the implementation of the incoming Obama Administration's massive economic stimulus plan will be available to the public online - that's what Peter Orszag, the nominee for Office of Management and Budget chief, told the Senate government affairs committee today.

With just hours to go before the Obama transition finishes and the new government is born, the Technology Innovation and Government Reform group (i.e. TIGR) is featured on the Change.gov website.

Three rising stars of open and collaborative government are featured in the video: Beth Noveck, author of the forthcoming book Wiki Government and longtime pioneer in this arena (she and her partners convinced the US Patent Office to embrace user-generated content with their Peer-to-Patent program); Vivek Kundra, Washington DC's pathbreaking Chief Technology Officer (check out his "Apps for Democracy" contest); and Andrew Mclaughlin, head of global public policy and government affairs for Google.

New incoming Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag gave every department and agency formal notice on what it needs to do to stay on the good side of Recovery.gov, in the form of a 60-page all-agency memo numbered M-09-10. Recovery.gov might be groundbreaking from the cheap seats, but much of the memo will be familiar reading to its intended audience. In many ways -- from reporting requirements and even data formats demanded -- what Orszag's asking of agencies on Recovery.gov mimics what they're already doing for the federal contracts portal USAspending.gov.

This is a very brief public service announcement. Remember the "Citizen's Briefing Book" that the Obama team launched during the campaign, the one that would pull together the most highly rated ideas on Change.gov and deliver them to President Obama post-inauguration? (At least, that's how I and Google remember it. The archives on Change.gov have fallen into a black hole of transition history.) The project was one of a string of citizen-participation experiments launched during the transition, alongside Open for Questions and Your Seat at the Table. So, has the Citizen's Briefing Book reached the president's desk? Not quite yet, say folks in the White House. Given the pressures of the first several weeks of getting a new presidential administration up and running -- and the launch of WhiteHouse.gov, Recovery.gov and other online projects -- the CBB seems to be somewhere down the list of things to get to.</PSA>

To the suprise of, um, exactly no one, Julius Genachowski was nominated today by President Obama to head the Federal Communications Commission. And word is that DC CTO Vivek Kundra will also finally get his nod as OMB e-government administrator shortly. But Mother Jones' Jonathan Stein has talked to tech advocates and other interested parties who are getting a bit antsy that the White House still has not named someone to the long-promised post of Chief Technology Officer -- despite the fact that, as Stein writes, "Obama has already given the CTO homework." By presidential memorandum, the CTO has until late May to draft an Open Government Directive.

For the time being, it seems that that first CTO assignment has been handed over to law professor Beth Noveck, who has set up temporary shop in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. But don't look for the OSTP website to provide much reassurance that there are sufficient hands on deck: the "Leadership & Staff" page is drop-dead blank. That said, Noveck seems to have a least some support. Federal News Radio's Jason Miller reported mid last month that GSA Interagency Policy and Management Director Michele Heffner is on a three-month detail at OSTP. The concern, though, is that, as Stein quotes the Sunlight Foundation's Ellen Miller as sharing, an eventual CTO won't feel a whole lot of ownership over a open-government agenda he or she didn't have a hand in creating.

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.

Development Seed's Ian Cairnes has good rundown over at the Center for American Progress' Science Progress about what good government data empowers citizens to create, using DC's Apps for Democracy contest as a case study. Well worth a read.

There's a related wrinkle when it comes to the promise and potential of mashing up government data on the city, state, and federal level. If Recovery.gov succeeds, it seems, it will be example number one for open government advocates as they make the case that good data can actually improve governance -- and boost Americans' faith in government. In that case, we have OMB and the eventual CTO setting standards on how data must (with the full backing of the federal government) be structured. There was no quicker way to kill a conversation at Transparency Camp last weekend than to wonder aloud how data standards for municipal data sharing should be established. If we learned anything from The Wire, it's that there's real power in defining how data is defined and collected. One suggestion heard at Transparency Camp: early adopters, like the DC city government, should lay down data patterns and then try to sell other cities on them.

Following up on Nancy Scola's post today, I'd like to suggest a few areas where Vivek Kundra's past indicates some of the priorities he'll probably stress in his new post, based on the frequent conversations we've had regarding a book that we're co-authoring, "Democratizing Data" (it's unclear at this point whether he will be able to continue with the book project: stay tuned!).