Tomorrow (Thursday) morning at 11:30 ET, President Obama will return to the White House's East Room where he held a prime time press conference Tuesday night for a somewhat less precedented Q&A: a virtual town hall on the economy -- organized to respond to online questions submitted and promoted through Open for Questions, WhiteHouse.gov's first experiment in interactive citizen engagement. According to the White House press office, Jared Bernstein, chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, will "facilitate" the town hall, posing selected questions to the president and even teeing up video queries.

Popular questions unlikely to make it past Bernstein includes those advocating for the legalization of marijuana, which -- in a demonstration of the iron-clad "Mary Jane Rule" of online forums -- have risen to the top of the OFQ sections on green jobs, financial stability, health care reform, and the budget. The question round closes at 9:30 tomorrow morning, and as of about 10:45 tonight, about 55,500 people have submitted 57,000 questions and cast 2.1 million votes. Some big groups with big email lists have been playing along. Organizing for America, the mobilization wing of the DNC, has been mailing their contacts to encourage participation, saying "Americans deserve to know what their government is doing to get our economy back on track. But it's up to you to participate and make this experiment a success." And MoveOn is asking supporters to search the Google Moderator-powered tool for "public health insurance plan" and cast a vote in support of a government alternative to private health insurance. (There's a web-form-based alternative if you don't want to create a WhiteHouse.gov account or pass through Google servers.)

Gathered in the East Room for the morning event, says the White House, will be "approximately 100 people, including teachers, nurses, small business owners, and community leaders," as well as a contingent of press. Micah and I will be doing some liveblogging of the occasion, so join us here.

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.

From time to time, we receive submissions from entrepreneurs with ideas and/or products that we think ought to be of interest to PdF/tP readers. Running those pieces should not be construed as an endorsement of a specific product. Rather we welcome these submissions because it's important to build dialogue between technologists and politicos, that is, between the makers and users of new tools and services. In that spirit, we welcome this piece from J. Brooke Aker of Expert System USA. The Editors.

The Office of Public Liaison in the new Obama administration is promising to listen to citizens as it considers policy direction, legislation and brings the people to Washington rather than bringing Washington to the people. The most concrete of these proposals is to allow a five-day comment period by citizens via the Internet before the President signs any legislation. Even now, anyone can offer an opinion directly to the President here. You can contribute up to 5,000 characters. That is roughly 400 words.

Yesterday, I tweeted a complaint that the public comment page on WhiteHouse.gov, where legislation is theoretically being posted five days before President Obama's signs it to allow the public to chime in, only allowed for a 500 character entry. This is absurd, I wrote.

This morning, I took another glance and noticed the space allotted for comments had been expanded to 5,000 characters. This is much better, methinks. Though it's still a far cry from a meaningful use of the web to engage the public in monitoring and improving the legislative process. But I guess you have to take baby steps before you can walk.

Now you can enter the full text of a Maureen Dowd column and still
have 500 characters left over for a few Ana Marie Cox tweets...

• As has long been rumored, it does seem that DC CTO Vivek Kundra will be headed to the Obama Administration -- but not as "CTO." Not technically, at least. Do the split e-gov-administrator/OSTP-tech-director posts live up to the spirit and intention of Obama's CTO campaign pledges?...
• It's fascinating to watch Organizing for America quickly evolve, and we have some compelling new details on the evolution...
• Also on the OFA tip, we're reading the tea leaves online turf claims to chart the interaction between this new organization, what's left of Obama campaign organization in Chicago, and the Democratic Party...
• WhiteHouse.gov made about four-fifths good on their pledge to post legislation online with the recent SCHIP bill...
• And even more.

• Even after dropping a $20 million provision for resodding the National Mall, Barack Obama's $819 billion stimulus package came up with a big goose egg when it comes to Republican votes in the House. And that's not to mention the 11 "no" votes in the Democratic column. So is this when the President turns for backup to the masses of supporters he gained during the campaign?...
• The Sunlight Foundation's John Wonderlich has a wonderful post making a critical point: in the minds of many, government transparency is quickly transforming from a "what" to a "how"...
• Senator-in-limbo Norm Coleman's campaign staff is claiming that the combined attention of "tens of thousands" of disenfranchised and otherwise angry Minnesotans has brought his website crashing down...
• House Minority Leader John Boehner narrates a new four-minute behind-the-scenes look at how the stimulus bill vote went down in the House yesterday. It's pretty masterful work...
• And more.

• It was touch and go there for a while. Would Barack Obama emerge victorious from the first major face-off of his presidency? Would he prevail over the dark forces who sought stifle him? Obama for the win!
• You no doubt heard reports yesterday that new Obama White House staffers were upset to find themselves expected to communicate via smoke signals and semaphore. That's bunk, says former Bush Administration officials...
• Some are grumbling that the 72-hour-old WhiteHouse.gov is a huge disappointment...
• And more.

• One of the two executive orders signed by Barack Obama in his first full day in office pledged to shift governing presumptions about secrecy in the executive branch. With the swipe of a pen, Obama hopes to do away with the federal government's knee-jerk compulsion to squirrel away information...
• New White House staffers find themselves time-traveled back about, oh, a decade when they walk through 1600 Pennsylvania's gates...
• The latest in the on-going "will he or won't he" saga involving Obama's beloved Blackberry...
• And more.

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.

• While it might not have been until a few minutes after noon that Barack Obama and John Roberts got that oath of office thing sorted out, the White House New Media team was ready to go on time...
• Footage of Sunday's "We Are One" concert at the Lincoln Memorial has been pulled down from YouTube, with shots of Pete Seeger and Challenger, the bald eagle who wouldn't fly, replaced by "this video is no longer available due to a copyright claim" notices...
• He's keeping the Blackberry, reports someone who ought to know...
• And more.