This is the 2008 Dopplr report for Barack Obama. The travel tracking site is sending out custom reports to all users, but is rather cleverly promoting one for the President-elect. It's probably a safe bet that few folks got around like Obama last year, what with his countless jaunts to Iowa and Hawaii and Iowa and Kenya and Iowa and Kabul and, well, Iowa. Obama's 248 separate trips and 234 days on the road, the report notes, left a carbon footprint equivalent to that of 4.2 Hummers. (And, no, Obama's not actually a Dopplr user. The company compiled trip records from press reports.)

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>

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.

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.

Nestled in the gargantuan omnibus appropriations bill currently cooling its heals before Congress is a snippet of language that may be of interest. What the provision, inserted by Silicon Valley Democrat Mike Honda, would do is start the process of pushing out federal legislative records in bulk, directly to the public. Wired's Kim Vitter has details on Honda's provision. The raison d'être of the Library of Congress' THOMAS system, as you likely know, is to make legislative documents accessible, from bill texts to Congressional Research Service summaries to co-sponsor lists to status updates. THOMAS was cutting edge when it was introduced. Of course, that was back when Bill Clinton was waxing futuristic about bridges to the 21st century. Today, it's showing its age. Working with THOMAS can be an exercise in frustration. The lack of persistent URLS, for example, means that individual documents can be difficult to link to directly. And THOMAS isn't great at engaging the public on the colloquial level it has towards legislation. (Try search THOMAS for "stimulus.") THOMAS today is a pretty good database with a lagging user interface attached.

User-friendly sites like OpenCongress (which, hey and by the way, has just released a bunch of new features, including a wiki) have stepped in to fill the breach, but they work by scraping THOMAS. Honda's office is looking for help determining the best method for pushing out bulk legislative data, whether that's an API or, Honda's online director Rob Pierson tells Wired, "some sort of bulk-data download." Share your thoughts here or in Wired's comments, and Honda's office is sure to see them.

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.

Under the banner of "Yes We Scan," open-access/public domain advocate Carl Malamud is running a well oiled campaign for the office of Public Printer that's not short on creativity or gumption. Nope, the directorship of the Government Printing Office isn't an elected post. But while Malamud's path to Washington office might be less traveled, he's happy to point out that he's not the first to go down it. In a Twitter-based rally yesterday, Malamud pledged to channel "channel Gus" and "create nomination book" of tweets and the other messages of support pouring in. That's Augustus "Gus" Giegengack, the 13th head of the Government Printing Office. Gus, a working printer, traveled the lecture circuit collecting letters to support which he then presented to FDR. He got the job.

Malamud points to a 1943 New Yorker series on Giegengack that describes him "an efficient and forward-looking man," who "not only has kept up with increased demand but anticipated it." (It's a cruel twist that the Geigengack profile is behind the New Yorker's pay wall.) Giegengack printed a devastating book of photographs to convince Congress to up funding for GPO. Malamud has created a handsome timeline of his decades of accomplishments in freeing public data.

Giegengack is further described as "a man who wears spats whenever the temperature falls below forty." No word yet on when Malamud trots out his spats.

The Daily News' Erin Einhorn is reporting that members of the New York City Council want to open up the city's immensely popular 311 system. "Eliminate the middleman," says Speaker Christine Quinn, and put the information the non-emergency line's operators use online and on iPhones and the like. Mayor and technophile Mike Bloomberg calls it "a brilliant idea." The members didn't make clear if under their proposal citizens might feed information -- like details on potholes, broken street lights, or flooding -- back into the database. Press release after the jump...

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.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the White House new media team is emerging triumphant from...Lemme try again. Like General George Washington's revolutionary soldiers, counted out after their rations dwindled and they couldn't get their email working...Nevermind. The point is, after a predictably slow start, the White House's new media operation is being seen in a new light as a result of today's Open for Questions online forum. "The Obama technological and organizational dynamo," writes the Washington Times' Jon Ward, "is beginning to hit its stride." And the inaugural effort does seem to be attracting eyeballs and interest. As the Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas notes, participation has nearly doubled in the last 24 hours. In the day and a half the question round remained open, OFQ pulled in about 93,000 people, 104,000 questions, and 3.6 million votes. (Perhaps proof of Organizing for America's sustained organizing might?) And as is the natural order of things, questions about legalizing marijuana have risen to the top of the heap, as Wired's Nicholas Thompson notes. But the White House was clever enough to leave itself a bit of wiggle room in what questions it will address. ("[T]he President will...answer some of the most popular questions...") Obama et al have shown a willingness to adjust the rules of online free-for-alls to align them with workably common-sense thinking. The White House isn't Digg, and it's likely our own thinking about what's an acceptable way to run a virtual presidential town hall will come to conform to theirs. Of course, Open for Questions belongs to the American people -- not just progressives or liberals or Democrats. And isn't just the playground for Organizing for America or MoveOn. The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini, cleverly sees an opening: "With a little organizing, this is an opportunity for Republicans to vote up questions that hold Obama accountable for ballooning the national debt to $20 trillion by 2019."