Over the next two months, the Federal Communications Commission will be holding a series of open public workshops on various aspects of the emerging "National Broadband Plan," which it is mandated to deliver by the end of the year. The workshops cover everything from deployment of broadband services to how these new services may help improve health care, education, job training and the environment, and they are bound to be an important locus of ongoing debate as the powerful FCC gets reshaped under the Obama administration. Indeed, our very own Andrew Rasiej has been invited to participate in the first one, this coming August 6th on e-government and civic engagement.

We think these workshops could be very enlightening, and appreciate that the commission is making the process so open to the public. So we've lined up a bunch of techPresident bloggers and PdF friends to track the broadband workshops, which will be webcast live as they happen around the country. We won't be formally "live-blogging" the hearings but you should expect to see timely reports on each of the following hearings...

• A recent Congressional Research Service Report confirmed that what we know for absolute certain about the new federal CTO job doesn't amount to all that much. But Christopher J. Dorobek has some intriguing new reporting that shines much light on the situation. What we've been talking about as the CTO post, writes Dorobek, actually breaks down into two jobs...
• "It's not the Democratic party anymore," says one "highly placed" Democrat. "It's the Obama party." That's one of the more striking bits of Lisa Taddeo's new Esquire profile of Obama campaign manager David Plouffe...
• National Journal's David Herbert makes the case that what's limiting federal agencies' online impact isn't so much the Paperwork Reduction Act and other regulations as it is the challenges of connecting to an audience...
• There's some chatter starting to happen around the idea that the some $9 billion or so in broadband money in the stimulus package is a bad bet...
• And more.

Team McCain pwns the Obama campaign by tracking screen captures that show changes to the Democratic candidate's website subsection on Iraq; with an innovative and occassionally funny digital townhall, Rep. John Culberson gets one step closer to be a "real time representative;" JibJib has a new video; we highlight the latest development in the ongoing conservative battle over broadband; and much, much more.

I'm here at PdF '08 at a press conference marking the launch of InternetforEveryone.com, a coalition pushing for universal high-speed Internet, centered around four core tenets: access, choice, openness, and innovation. The unveiling of the broadband effort was a unique opportunity to witness some pretty, ehem, prolific talkers from the worlds of academia, advocacy, and business strictly held to just one or two minutes, and so I've tried to capture their mico-arguments in favor of universal broadband here.