Among Barack Obama's more memorable pledges upon entering the White House was to create "an unprecedented level of openness in Government." This past week, two reports graded the Administration's commitment to this pledge thus far. The grades are mediocre.

OpenTheGovernment.org's 40+ page report (PDF) touches on digital issues, such as declassification of emails and the Open Government Directive project, but mainly sticks to issues like FOIA, FISA, executive privilege, and whistleblower protection.

On Wednesday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center published a smaller yet more digitally-focused report (PDF). The grades range from a C+ on civil liberty matters like the PATRIOT Act and REAL ID, to an A- for medical privacy.

1. Getting people online (broadband access, and lessons for people who don’t have the skills or interest)
2. Protecting people from bad things done using the Internet (terrorism, child abuse, fraud, hacking, intellectual property infringement)
3. Building websites for departments and agencies.

The government does all these things primarily because it believes that the Internet boosts the economy of the UK, and that IT can reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality. Together, these outweigh the dangers, meaning it doesn’t get banned. Gordon Brown’s recent speech at Google, was an exemplar of this mainly economically driven celebration of the Internet’s virtues, telling audience members that your industry is driving the next stage of globalisation”.

The first challenge for the government is to understand that whilst these beliefs are true, they are only a minor part of the picture. Tellingly, Brown's speech contained almost no language that couldn’t have been used to explain the positive impact of electrification or shipping containers.

Tim O'Reilly announced a government 2.0 conference to be held in DC via twitter saying "Looks like the word is out, just before my #etech keynote where I was planning to announce it: Gov 2 Summit in DC http://www.gov2summit.com/." This is the latest in a whole series of events in DC focused on how technology will influence governance in the Obama age. Looks like we'll get "change we can believe in" or at least talk it to death.

As you might have heard, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account was violated and its contents -- including family photos and contact information -- splayed across message boards, gossip blogs, and elsewhere across the web; The Commission on Presidential Debates and MySpace have gotten together to spawn MyDebates.org; The House Committee on Financial Services recently considered the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, a bill opposed by commercial banks, local chambers of commerce, and others in the financial industry. So it just might be interesting to know how much money those interests where kicking into the coffers of the members of Congress vetting the bill, right? That's precisely what you can do with Maplight's remarkable new congressional committee tool; and much more.