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Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 1:00 pm Transparency and Open Government Vivek Kundra, our Chief Information Officer, and Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, explain the Open Government Initiative On January 21, 2009, his first full day in office, the President issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government and called for recommendations for making the Federal government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. As Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to the President says in the video below, we are proud "to announce an important next step in this historic call to action - one that will help us achieve a new foundation for our government - a foundation built on the values of transparency, accountability and responsibility." The Administration is committed to developing those recommendations in an open fashion. Consistent with the President's mandate, we want to be fully transparent in our work, participatory in soliciting your ideas and expertise, and collaborative in how we experiment together to use new tools and techniques for developing open government policy. Today we are kicking off an unprecedented process for public engagement in policymaking on the White House website. In a sea change from conventional practice, we are not asking for comments on an already-finished set of draft recommendations, but are seeking fresh ideas from you early in the process of creating recommendations. We will carefully consider your comments, suggestions, and proposals. Here's how the public engagement process will work. It will take place in 3 phases: Brainstorming, Discussion, and Drafting. Beginning today, we will have a brainstorming session for suggesting ideas for the open government recommendations. You can vote on suggested ideas or add your own. Then on June 3rd, the most compelling ideas from the brainstorming will be fleshed out on a weblog in a discussion phase. On June 15th, we will invite you to use a wiki t

Now that President Obama, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty have all declared their intentions to run for President in 2012 and rolled out their initial campaign websites, and another leading contender, Sarah Palin, has also unveiled a revamped website for her political operation, SarahPac, it's possible to begin sketching the contours of the 2012 election online. And so far, the inside-the-beltway political media is missing the big story. It's not Facebook. It's the data, stupid.

"Google Moderator on YouTube Enables Real-Time Feedback from Your Audience Share Starting today, YouTube has integrated the ability to use Google Moderator into your YouTube channel. Moderator is a social platform that allows you to solicit ideas or questions on any topic, and have the community vote the best ones up to the top in real-time. YouTube previously used Google Moderator as part of its interviews with American President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper."

whitehouse-logo-mar09.pngBoth YouTube and the White House announced today that this year's State of the Union address will be broadcast on the YouTube channel Citizentube, as well as streamed live and broadcast to your iPhone. In addition to these Internet broadcasts, both announced that the average Joe or Jane Citizen would get a chance to ask the president some questions this time around, by way of a contest on Google Moderator.

This isn't the first time a State Department has supported a president. It's part of the job description. But technology seems to be greasing the wheels on that relationship. One or two runs below Clinton, there's tech-driven symbiosis afoot. Take Obama's speech last week in Accra, Ghana. It's a great example of how, using new media, two DC powerhouses are feeding off one another's efforts. A taste of what we're talking about here

President Obama declared during the campaign that "we are the ones we've been waiting for." That messianic phrase held the promise of a new style of politics in this time of tweets and pokes. But it was vague, a paradigm slipped casually into our drinks. To date, the taste has proven bittersweet.

So the White House is taking a sensible multi-pronged approach to reaching Ghanaians. The blend includes SMS -- for both sending messages to the President and getting speech highlights -- and radio -- of both Obama's remarks and his responses to mobile messages, fleshed out with Twitter, Facebook, and live video streaming components.

The report furthers the goals of President Obama's open government policy, including the need to "disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use" and represents a step forward in the Data.Gov concept of Federal CIO Vivek Kundra to "democratize data and give data access to the public.