Daily Digest | A Sprinkle of People, a Dash of Digital

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Daily Digest

Daily Digest | A Sprinkle of People, a Dash of Digital

the editors | July 2, 2009 - 1:09pm | Email This!

Obama Delivers Health Care Pitch, With a Sprinkle of People and a Dash of Digital For yesterday's 70-minute presidential health reform event at Northern Virginia Community College, the White House collected more than 450 video questions through YouTube in the days leading up to the event. President Barack Obama answered three of them. Not many, to be sure. But then again, a total of just eight questions on the proposed overhaul of the American health care system got asked in the hour-plus session, regardless of whether they came by video, via Twitter, or in the flesh. But an event like yesterday's raises a nagging question: Does the "online townhall" format simply break down when raised to the presidential level?
Kundra and Phillips Chat About IT Spending Transparency 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 -- questions that, once the chat got rolling, were coming in "fast and furious"...
Declassification Group Wants Help Crafting Sensible Secrecy The congressionally-mandated Public Interest Declassification Board is making use of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's blog to collect public input on government-wide reform of how we approach the classification of information, as part of an attempt to deal with the secrecy-inflation in recent years that has seen every order form for a new carton of printer paper marked "Top Top Secret." At the moment, PIDB wants you to join the discussion about whether it would help matters to establish a National Declassification Center...
[Video] A Look at the GOP's Digital Future Via TechRepublican, we have video of RNC new media director Todd Herman's presentation at PdF '09 earlier this week. Herman's talk certainly caught attention, but what was also fascinating was to take in the reactions to it amongst the conference crowd. Our Andrew Rasiej described the audience as falling about 80% on the left side of the political spectrum and 20% on the right, but the more interesting split might have been between the political and the technological...
A reminder about PdF Europe (Nov 21-22) and PdF 2010 Special 2-For-1 Offer - Last Day Don't forget Monday's big announcement about Personal Democracy Forum Europe, our first conference overseas, which is happening November 21-22 in Barcelona, at the Torre Agbar. To get on the mailing list for more details, go to www.personaldemocracy.eu and sign up! And, until Thursday only, we're making a special offer to PdF conference attendees and anyone else interested in attending PdF 2010 here in New York City, scheduled for June 21-22. If you purchase a ticket to PdF 2010 by end of day today, you can bring a friend for free.