• The Organizing Phase of Health Care Reform: Obama's HHS appointee Tom Daschle has taken to the transition website Change.gov to respond to comments about how to cure what ails the American health landscape. But, of course, "interactivity" isn't necessarily limited to the web. The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly has a fascinating look at how the former senator from South Dakota is hosting a closed conference call with a thousand supporters culled from 10,000 with an interest in health care. And the HHS appointee is also promising to hold live town halls on health policy. Health care reform in the United States won't happen without a fight, and it's fascinating to watch Daschle recognize the need to mobilize the public behind what promises to be an epic battle.

• Case Study in Modernizing the Government Web: By dissecting a single blog post, the Sunlight Foundation's Greg Elin makes the case that, yes, even cautious, handcuffed government can make the web more interactive, more transparent, and even more fun! (Disclosure: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to Sunlight.) Change.gov recently hosted a blog post featuring video response by Daschle and a policy aide to the health care discussion launched on the site a few days back. A mere blog post? No, no, says Elin. It's chock full of lessons for the rest of government: RSS, embedded video via YouTube partnered with raw video formats, user profiles, comments, crowd wisdom, trust system, and even a Wordle tag cloud. (Note: Change.gov has just launched a second Join the Discussion session, this time on the economy.)

• Curtain Pulled Back on the Bloggers Inside the Transition: One unnoticed but much welcomed change to Change.gov: blog posts are now signed by their authors -- even retroactively. Turns out that they've been signed all along, and someone seems to have flipped the switch making them visible. If you've been following the Change.gov blog all along, turns out you've been reading the words of former campaign staffers Dave Rochelson (posts) and Dan McSwain (posts).

• How Obama Can Hang on to Millennials: Americans between the ages of 18 and 26 who turned out to vote did so on behalf of Barack Obama by a wide margin, something like two to one. How, though, can the President-elect make the best use of their interest and engagement? Young-people experts Morley Winograd and Michael Hais are arguing that rather than trying to pull that energy into the White House or party establishment, Obama and his advisors should set up a non-profit "devoted to the cause of harnessing Millennial's interest in civic engagement."

In Case You Missed It...

Nancy Scola says that the Courage Campaign's response to Proposition 8 on same-sex marriage points to the end of the "gay white people" movement. Nancy also looks at how the newly Creative Commons-licensed Change.gov has been re-packaged in the form of widgets and mobile apps.

Sarah Granger explores how new search tools like Cuil, Kosmix, and Deepdyve handle government websites including that of the Federal Election Commission and the Office of Management and Budget.

Colin Delany takes a look at the numbers coming out of the Obama campaign and says they spell one thing: "[O]nline communications campaigns should consider offering supporters tiers of potential engagement."

Tom Watson asks if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should, with her site Speaker.gov, try to out open-government the Obama administration's Change.gov.

Mike Turk questions about how interactive Change.gov or any administration web presence will truly be. "Having spent a year trying to get [the Department of] Energy to do something as relatively straightforward as agreeing to a common CMS and using it," writes Mike, "I foresee a lot of opposition."

Finally, tomorrow night, our Andrew Rasiej will be speaking after a showing of the new film "The End of America" at New York City's IFC Center. Details here.

Change.gov | government 2.0 | health care policy | millennials | Tom Daschle
Nancy Scola's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati