Wednesday Aneesh Chopra returned to San Francisco to meet with tech leaders and innovators about where we are re: national technology planning since he's now been CTO for several months. An eternal optimist, he spoke with Tim O'Reilly on the Web 2.0 Summit stage at length about the work ahead, wooing the crowd with his positive energy. But the message is clear: he's dedicated to getting things done in Washington.

O'Reilly made one comment that stood out: "There's a lot of good intention to open up government and there's a class of people who are paying attention, but unfortunately most of the people paying attention are those who stand to profit from it." Given what I've seen in the PdF community, via the Gov 2.0 Summit, Transparency Camps, South by Southwest and other related events, it's optimists from non-profit and public sectors who are driving the transparency initiative, but O'Reilly's point was well taken. A lot of great new innovation is happening in the transparency movement, but what happens if and when it turns into big business? Could too much private influence taint something well-intentioned? Will it scale? Can we keep with the pure motives as outlined? And can we really engage We the People?

We need to ponder these questions so that we can measure the success of the work at hand and help everyone from the White House to the local non-profit work out the details. Chopra believes that the set of profiles (government API, if you will) launched by the White House and other departments will help engage people in the process. Through Data.gov and whatever comes next, he's confident the innovators will have what they need to do the good work that needs to be done.

O'Reilly wants to know "how do we get online participation to be more than just random comment? How do we get something substantive going on?" At the Personal Democracy Forum, we've seen as many demos and ideas as O'Reilly has, and likely Chopra as well, but the intelligent large-scale crowdsourcing model still remains one of those questions, particularly with respect to the need for inclusive democratic participation.

Moving forward, it seems the cautiously optimistic view (the "idealistic realist" approach, as Madeline Albright calls it) makes good sense. If we can manage to put the pieces together and get all of the interests working collaboratively as Chopra envisions, this could be an exciting ride.