The White House has just released its Open Government Directive, long-awaited by transparency and "government 2.0" advocates, and at first glance, the meat on the bone looks pretty juicy. (Or, if you prefer a vegan metaphor, the sauce on the seitan looks pretty, um, creamy?) Nancy's got a sharp and detailed write-up here, and since I've been stuck in a meeting all day, I'm only going to add one additional wrinkle on a topic close to my heart that I think is worth highlighting, nay, hailing.

To me, one of the most important parts of the new directive is in this paragraph, in the section on "Publishing Government Information Online":

b. To the extent practicable and subject to valid restrictions, agencies should publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.

There’s a very interesting confluence of conversations taking place at the moment on the topic of how technology is changing politics. One is on the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency. Let me see if I can combine the threads. (And sorry, this is a bit of a long post, thanks to all the traveling in DC I did last week.)

Gov 2.0 must mean more than government agencies using social media, said Tim O'Reilly, at the opening of the day-long Gov 2.0 Expo at the DC Convention Center. Some 250-300 people have gathered early this rainy morning to try to figure out what that might involve. While Tim says he's here to learn (and god knows, being a conference organizer means you get to talk to all kinds of interesting people and hear about fascinating and creative projects early on), his opening keynote this morning offered some very useful teachings, and also some hints of what the ideology of Gov 2.0 might be.

As readers of this blog know, I believe people empowered by new communications technologies can make our government more open, participatory and collaborative--and god knows there's a lot of room for improvement over the system we have now. It's great that Tim O'Reilly is focusing his formidable brain and organization to help us think more deeply about these topics. Here are my rushed notes, with comments from me are in italics.

ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick has a quick profile of Tim O'Reilly -- publisher, convener, and a man with a plan to bring about an age of "government as a platform." Of late, O'Reilly has been actively working to pull together conversations between government and geeks, particularly of the West Coast variety. It's not as if those conversations were entirely missing from official Washington before. But in just a few short months O'Reilly has helped to create the assumption in both worlds that, to sound like Oprah for a moment, it's okay to talk.

Here's the profile. And here are details on O'Reilly's upcoming Gov 2.0 Summit. (Photo by Adam Tinworth under a Creative Commons license)

Calling all developers: The Sunlight Foundation, Google, O'Reilly Media and Techweb are launching a new contest, Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge, to celebrate the launch of Data.gov today.

Out of the minds of Google's Creative Lab's, where Googlers go to whip up the future, comes VoteHour.org. CEOs from eBay's John Donahoe to KPMG's Tim Flynn to the Donald himself urge their minions to take an hour from their work day to go vote; What's missing from GOP.com?, asks Mother Jones' Jonathan Stein. The answer is: a guy by the name of John McCain; Gartner Research group is out with a fascinating look at the state of government "social computing," which includes everything from social networks to collaborative web tools; and quite a bit more.