Was yesterday's all-day meeting at Blair House on health care reform a success? Well, by one measure, it was a huge success for the White House new media operation, which provided a live web stream to users all over the web. This tweet from new media director Macon Phillips sums it up:

In a half-hour live chat conducted on the White House website and Facebook, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and White House new media director Macon Phillips explained the inspiration for and mechanics of a new federal tech spending oversight site that debuted at PdF '09 earlier this week. IT.USAspending.gov offers a portal onto agency spending data on high-dollar federal technology investments. During the live chat, Phillips pulled in questions from the Internet. (One the chat got rolling, Facebook questions, said Phillips, were coming in "fast and furious.") Kundra answered them -- including an intriguing little riff on how every new historical transformation in the nature of technology compels government to adapt, either to merely survive or, hopefully, to thrive.

Coming in at just under 30 minutes, true geeks are going to want more detail on the Kundra approach to data-enabled management. Most normal human beings are going to want less. But this lunch-time sized session of engagement is a low-bar way to include the greatest possible swath of citizens in the changing nature of government.

Here are my semi-verbatim but not perfectly precise notes from this morning's speakers at GovWebCon. Random comments and observations from me in [brackets]. The first session is led by Vivek Kundra, federal CIO, and Macon Phillips, White House new media director, who start off by sharing their vision for a new era of online government. Much more after the jump.

I'm attending the Government Web Managers Conference in Washington, DC, today and tomorrow, and I'll be posting periodic updates as the event unfolds. Some 400 web managers from the federal, state and local level are here, a sold-out crowd in fact. Last year, my colleague Andrew Rasiej spoke at the conference and reported being struck by how many attendees viewed Barack Obama as the presidential candidate most likely to open up government use of the web.

It's still a bit early, obviously, in the Obama administration, to make full judgments about whether that expectation is being fulfilled, but over the next two days I hope to be able to report on some of the most interesting developments. This morning's keynote speakers are Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO; Macon Phillips, the director of White House new media; Katie Stanton, director of citizen participation for the new media office; and Bev Godwin, director of online resources & interagency development, White House office of new media (and the person who used to run the Federal web managers council in years past).

Why spend two days with government web managers? (Yes, I have embraced my inner nerd.) Well, I have a theory that at this particular moment in time, due to a confluence of technological, political and social factors, web managers inside government agencies are de facto change agents. They stand at the intersection of public and internal communication, and the tools and practices they are now getting the permission to embrace have inherently disruptive and transformative effects. Hopefully I will find some fresh evidence to support that theory over the next two days.

If you want to follow the conference chatter on Twitter, use the hashtag #govwebcon. The conference organizers have set up a screen near the front of the stage showing incoming tweets, and may even be taking questions from the public through that "twitterfall."

It's worth taking a moment to applaud the work of Macon Phillips and the other members of the Obama transition new media team, for how they have hit the ground running and built a dynamic, responsive and refreshingly open and creative government website. Every day, it seems, some new element appears on Change.gov...details after the jump.