Yesterday, in the city by the bay, Netroots Nation hosted an information and idea-packed New Media Summit in part to gather Bay Area locals and also to convene progressive activists in preparation for the Netroots Nation conference coming in August.

The half day program, followed by a party, began with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ended with candidate for CA Attorney General, Kamala Harris, and contained some fascinating panels on different aspects of new media in politics and activism. As always, Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) drew interest from the full house, as did Clara Jeffery (Mother Jones), Karl Frisch (Media Matters), Cheryl Contee (Jack & Jill Politics), Gina Cooper (Netroots Nation founder), and speakers from Digg, Facebook and Ning.

At the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Nancy Scola and I facilitated a session at entitled "Whitehouse.gov 2.0: Upgrading to Open Source Government." We were impressed by the turnout for what was defined as a Core Conversation - essentially a brainstorming session on how to help government achieve broad goals of transparency. The idea behind the meeting was to take what came out of it and produce a report to people in the White House about what was discussed. Nancy and I both felt that this, like Transparency Camp, Government 2.0 Camp and other recent and coming events, are just the beginning of the discussion.

What is written here is a rough account of the session taken from our note taker during South by Southwest, and from this information we will be submitting a report to the White House on recommendations for the future growth of Whitehouse.gov as well as for open government and transparency in general. We appreciate feedback and additions if there's anything we missed in this article that occurred during the conversation.

Monday at 3:30 at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Nancy Scola and I will be facilitating a Core Conversation entitled "Whitehouse.gov 2.0: Upgrading to Open Source Government." We'll provide an overview of the concepts behind employing open source principles to government through technology and how the new administration is running with their campaign promise to improve government transparency online. Then the majority of the session will comprise a discussion about what participants want to see coming out of government in terms of information, and how people most want to be a part of providing input.

First it was #tcot - a grassroots conservative hashtag organized to get more like-minded people together tweeting about their views on issues and current events. Soon thereafter, #rebelleft and #topprog were launched for progressives - to mixed reviews. A new effort launched late last week, #p2 addresses the challenge of organizing progressives on Twitter in a collaborative nature. Introduced by Jon Pincus and Tracy Viselli, #p2 aims bring together participants from all progressive groups on Twitter - #topprog, #rebelleft, #fem2, #woc and #lgbt as well as the Progressive Exchange community. So far, the shorter #p2 tag is picking up steam, already being used by @huffpost.

Trolling the depths of government websites a few weeks ago, I stumbled on the CyberCemetery, a project of the University of North Texas Libraries. Not unlike archive.org, it stores some of the projects long since dead online for research purposes. Most of the sites are from temporary commissions, but they provide an interesting snapshot of programs published online at the end of the Clinton administration and through the Bush administration. Fodder for Friday the 13th.

At last year's Personal Democracy Forum conference, Linkfluence gave a remarkable visual presentation about the political web under "Presidential Watch 08." The crowd responded favorably, particularly when we could see spheres of influence like the Obama and McCain websites with respect to progressive and conservative blogs. The data is fascinating to observe. Yesterday in Washington, they gave a similar presentation at the Fem 2.0 conference on the "Feminist web."

As the tech community poured over the new whitehouse.gov site, one of the first subterranean changes noted was that of a file most people would never notice called robots.txt. This file serves as a notice to search robots informing them of what files they should or shouldn't survey. Upon seeing the new version of the file, some noticed that it only had two lines of code excluding robot searches vs. the former whitehouse.gov robots.txt that had nearly 2400 lines of exclude lines by the end of the Bush administration, sparking excitement and controversy over what the change means in terms of government transparency.

At 12:01pm Eastern time, as promised, the whitehouse.gov domain flipped over and we received our first glimpse of what's to come over the next four years. Take a look!

Netroots Nation isn't just about one big conference anymore. Now they're hosting events across the country, including their inaugural "Yes We Can Party" on the eve of inauguration, January 19th. "We blogged. We phone banked. We knocked on doors. We campaigned. We organized. We left it all on the road. And now, we celebrate!"