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.

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.

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!).

The New York Times' Brian Knowlton's got a good recap of a conference call with new U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, and Kundra lets it be know that he'll be establishing a Data.gov site "that will put vast amounts of government information into the public domain." (Me think Knowlton's using "public domain" in the colloquial and not legal sense.) With the proliferation of new administration stand-alone sites -- Recovery.gov, Financial Stability.gov, AStrongMiddleClass.gov -- we're going to need Domains.gov to keep them all straight.

[UPDATE] See? Every time you turn around, pop!, a new domain. This afternoon's: HealthReform.gov.

In geek quarters, Vivek Kundra's appointment to the new post of Chief Information Officer/e-Government Administrator of the United States is sparking hosannas and cries of joyful anticipation such as you've never heard before. But that's because Kundra's uttering things about government not often spoken by someone with the power to make them happen. O'Reilly's Tim O'Brien has clips and notes from a conference call in which Kundra hops from Facebook-style self-organizing to the Human Genome Project to intra-governmental collaboration via wiki. CNET's Stephanie Condon does a rundown on the appointment (in which the CIO is framed as sort of the alpha CIO responsible for leading the many CIOs scattered across government). And the Sunlight Foundation's Clay Johnson has a quick guide to the tenets of Kundraism: (1) using alternative market models to reduce cost, (2) data driven decisions, and (3) operational data is public data.

Over in the Open Government Google Group (which you might want to consider joining) Alexis Madrigal admits that the Wired story on open government he's been working on wasn't working: "The actual mode of journalism with its traditional endgoal of a 'finished product' article that tells people how it is wasn't up to the task." So, he figured, hey, what's good for the government is good for the writer, and went open source with the project. Be sure to check out Wired's new How-To Open Government Data wiki, built on MediaWiki. The goal is pick a wide assortment of brains on specific areas where data sets the government produces should be put to better use for lay citizens and government employees alike, like turning USDA spreadsheets on crops and cattle into far more user-friendly XML feeds.

Madrigal's wiki joins a suddenly more crowded field of folks working to help incoming CIO Vivek Kundra figure out to marshall the information the government has at its fingertips. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) eGovernment Interest Group is holding a meeting in DC March 12th and 12th aimed at "develop[ing] a road map for developing Web standards to realize open and interoperable solutions."

ArsTechnica's Julian Sanchez asks the tough question on everyone's minds. Well, if it's not, it's clear in retrospect that it should have been. Yes, Vivek Kundra is visionary, revolutionary, and an open-government maestro. But is the newly-appointed U.S. "CIO" being handed a newly-created and ultra-powerful post? Or is he stepping into the existing Office of Management and Budget e-government administrator job? Sanchez does something that the old folks call reporting and picked up the phone to OMB. And yep, Kundra's actual appointment is to Karen Evans' old job of "Administrator of E-Government and Information Technology," a position that's been around since 2001. Sanchez jokes, "Everyone who had heard of Karen Evans before just now, raise your hand" -- thus forcing me to raise my hand and bury my head on my desk in shame. But he has a point. Evans acted as a coordinator and spokesperson -- leading the Federal CIO Council, frequently testifying before Congress on the state of federal IT -- but CIOs and CTOs embedded in individual agencies and department still retained a great deal of autonomy over their own IT processes.

Just a heads up that our new national CIO Vivek Kundra has the stage at FOSE right this very moment. He's saying interesting stuff, and if you happen not to be in the Washington Convention Center this morning, following along the #fose hashtag is a close second to being there.

I've been multitasking this morning, catching up on email and glancing at Twitter, and three times I've noticed the power of the live, interactive web as a new factor in my life.