But with the stimulus bill’s approval also comes the full launch of Recovery.gov, which holds out hope for the kind of transparency we actually need. Naturally, the site features Obama’s trademark blue-box Web design. And some of the initial features like the spending breakdown charts and the recovery timeline are interesting, as others have observed.

But the true measure of the site will be in the amount and the detail of the data, about how the money is actually spent and how many jobs are actually created. That data should not only be presented on the site, but released in a machine-readable form like XML so that anyone and everyone can parse it. In a new piece on Portfolio.com, I make the case that dumping federal data in such formats can actually be a stimulus in and of itself, as it both improves the contracting process and allows people build businesses around the data. But at the very least, people will find ways to interpret and display the progress of the stimulus in ways that Obama’s people would never think of or have the wherewithal to carry out.

The site’s FAQ promises that the data is on its way, but as we’ve seen with the current lack of a federal CTO, of any streamed cabinet meetings, and of the five day comment period on legislation — all explicit Obama campaign pledges — promises are just that. In one worrisome sign, ProPublica reports that there is no defined method by which states and localities have to provide information on their spending.

Last night I was speaking to a local supervisor for Daly City, south of San Francisco, who is on a committee overseeing the deployment of several million dollars in stimulus money. He said much of the money would go, literally, to purchasing concrete and asphalt for construction projects. (And interestingly, he was concerned that with several local cities doing the same, the price of local cement mixers and the like would skyrocket). I asked him if he knew of any requirement that they keep track of how many specific jobs the purchases created. His answer: “not that I’m aware of.”

Our work begins with a new framework of oversight and governance of all aspects of our Financial Stability Plan.

The American people will be able to see where their tax dollars are going and the return on their government’s investment, they will be able to see whether the conditions placed on banks and institutions are being met and enforced, they will be able to see whether boards of directors are being responsible with taxpayer dollars and how they’re compensating their executives, and they will be able to see how these actions are impacting the overall flow of lending and the cost of borrowing.

These new requirements, which will be available on a new website FinancialStability.gov, will give the American people the transparency they deserve.

(Clicking over there a few minutes ago, I found a text-only “coming soon” page, with links to Geithner’s remarks. In a way, the page echoes the lack of detail critics observed in the speech itself.) FinancialStability.gov thus joins Recovery.gov, the designated future source of stimulus bill spending, and Astrongmiddleclass.gov, a site that’s meant to provide info on the Vice President’s middle class task force. The former sits idle, awaiting instructions that will presumably come with the passage of the bill. The latter redirects to a section of the White House Web site, and contains the same Obama-esque design. All this Web building, but to what end?

In general, developing sites around specific (and pressing) issues to keep the public informed strikes me as a good idea. But if some or many of these proposals are simply going to sit on Whitehouse.gov, with the same 500-character comment box, it’s going to be hard to keep declaring each of them as an exercise in some kind of extreme transparency.

Clint Hendler at the Columbia Journalism Review notes Obama’s view of Recovery.gov, as outlined in his recent Indiana town hall meeting:

“We’re actually going to set up something called Recovery.gov—this is going to be a special website we set up, that gives you a report on where the money is going in your community, how it’s being spent, how many jobs it’s being created so that all of you can be the eyes and ears. And if you see that a project is not working the way it’s supposed to, you’ll be able to get on that website and say, ‘You know, I thought this was supposed to be going to school construction but I haven’t noticed any changes being made.’ And that will help us track how this money is being spent. …The key is that we’re going to have strong oversight and strong transparency to make sure this money isn’t being wasted.”

I don’t agree with Hendler that’s Obama offers “far more detail” than the version of the Recovery.gov mentioned in the bills themselves. (The House bill has arguably more specificity on exactly the points Obama highlights: where the money is being spent and how many jobs are created.) But I do agree that the big question will be to what extent, and in what format, the actual data will be released, providing the basis for a more legitimate type of transparency — the kind where outside entities can parse the numbers themselves.

One reassuring development: TechPresident relays that Bev Godwin of the General Services Administration and USA.gov — whom I reported about in my recent Wired piece — is detailing to the White House new media team.

Well, via TechPresident, we learn that the YouTube afficionado most outraged by his inability to see his own grainy face alongside the President’s is…House Republican leader John Boener.

Boener’s people want his own video approved as an official response to the President’s January 24 address. They’ve got a point. If you’re going to allow “djfishbone” to advance our democratic dialogue by writing “YEA BUSH 2.0!! i’m not getting on the bus and going to the camp,” why not a proper video reply from the House Republican Leader? It’s possible that Obama’s new media folks have mistaken Boener, so…YouTubeish a screen name, for a less serious respondent.

Then again, Boener must have his hands full already, composing witty ripostes to his own video respondents, of which he has approved one. I can’t wait to see how he comes back at this guy:

Upon further reflection, though, the Obama policy seemed even more baffling. After all, they didn’t stop people from speaking to me. In fact, they kindly arranged some interviews. They just wouldn’t let those people put their name behind their (completely uncontroversial) words. More to the point, however, I was actually interviewing these people about transparency, which led to unintentionally ironic anonymice like this:

“Day one, do we need a White House My.BarackObama? I don’t think so,” says the Obama aide, who was required by the transition press office to speak anonymously. “It’s more important to step back and ask, what are the goals for the White House? And I think that making the government more accountable and transparent is more important than getting people to act.”

Important, but not so important as to warrant putting an actual person’s name behind the statement. To top it off, the Obama aide didn’t even seem to want to remain anonymous. They just didn’t want to break the rules. Even stranger, some of those same people have since spoken in public forums and made the exact statements which I was forced to keep un-attributed.

As Jack Schaffer points out today at Slate, this sort of knee-jerk impulse toward anonymity is also afoot in White House press “background briefings.” At the very least, an administration promising to be the most transparent in history should be required to offer an explanation for the policy, and probably discard it altogether, save for especially sensitive circumstances. It would be a good first step in creating a “presumption of openness.”

The first week of the Obama administration has offered answers to what were probably the four biggest questions about how he would translate the campaign’s tech acumen into the White House:

The first, which I addressed earlier in the week, was to what extent would the White House Web site feature the kind of social media and participation elements — common to the campaign and Change.gov — on day one? Answer: not much.  There’s a blog and some YouTube videos (see number two, below), but only a standard feedback form for contact. Personally, I’m neither surprised nor particularly disappointed about the lack of interactivity, which I don’t find particularly compelling in the first place. I am a little surprised that it took them a few days to get the executive orders up. But it is the first week.

The second was: would the Obama administration let bureacractic and legal obstacles get in the way of what they wanted to do online? Answer: apparently not. In posting the YouTube videos, the campaign circumvented the federal government’s long running inability to make a deal that would let them utilize YouTube (over, among other issues, YouTube’s terms of service, which require that any disputes be resolved in federal court — a no go for the executive branch.) As far as I can tell, there is no closed captioning on the current videos, which would be in violation of amendments to the 1973 Rehabilitation Act.  They also have quietly sidestepped prohibitions on government Web sites using persistant cookies.

Third, would Obama be allowed to keep his BlackBerry? Answer: Yes.

Finally, what would the Obama team do to try and keep alive the grassroots activism that flourished during the campaign? Or, in shorthand, to whence the list of 13 million email addresses gathered during the campaign? Answer: A new outfit, called Organizing for America (OFA), that will be housed at the Democratic National Committee. Obama announced the new setup in an email and video last week, and then David Plouffe and Mitch Stewart, the new executive director of OFA, talked about the handoff today. The campaign social networking hub, MyBarackObama.com, now has a form for people to enter there information and have it ported over to OFA. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of response they get, and whether they release the numbers.

This weekend on NPR (Sunday, I think, on most stations), I’ll have a stint on Bob Garfield’s show, “On the Media.” UPDATE: Here is my appearance, and here is the transcript.

UPDATE 2: I also appeared on BBC Five Live Radio on the same topic. Podcast available here.

Meanwhile, Change.gov is now frozen but still up; it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it, if anything. And if the transition team carried out the promise made on their “Citizen’s Briefing Book” segment, Obama at this very moment has a notebook on his desk revealing the nation’s top priority, according to the online crowd’s wisdom: “ending marijuana prohibition.” Somehow I’m guessing the answer is…no we can’t.

UPDATE: I should have noted that the first blog post on Whitehouse.gov is authored by Macon Phillips, I quoted in the Wired story and who was one of the savviest people I spoke with. It bodes well for the White House Web operation that he stayed on. Several of the biggest names from the campaign’s Web side returned to the private sector.

UPDATE 2: Some blog reaction: PC World notes the changes and the lack of avenues for participation, and points out that the Bush transition team flubbed their own digital transition in 2001.  Tim O’Reilly, not surprisingly, trumpets the site as the culmination of a victory for “Web 2.0 principles” — although it’s unclear how those principles are actually reflected in the site. Kottke observes the Obama team’s more parsimonious coding. Valleywag gets all clever with a they-say-they-for-participation-but-look-no-comments-allowed joke. (In other news: Valleywag still exists! Who knew.) And much more.

Over at Change.gov, the transition team went through another round with the “Open for Questions” feature, with responses from press secretary Robert Gibbs. Participation was high: “103,512 people submitted 76,031 questions and cast 4,713,083 votes,” according to the Obama folks. But after moderating out the Blagojevich questions in the first round, the transition team chose this time to simply ignore the most popular question (about naming an independent investigator to look into possible Bush administration crimes), as noted by The Nation’s Ari Melber.

Speculation continued ad nauseum over the presidential BlackBerry question, and the NY Times observed that BB was getting a lot of free marketing out of it. Back at the Bush White House, a federal judge ordered staffers to hand over their own mobile devices, in a continuing effort to relocate 14 million mysteriously “disappeared” Bush administration emails. Somebody hacked Obama’s campaign Twitter account, dark since election day, highlighting the complications underlying the 21st century presidency. Then, just today, an email from Obama arrived in supporters’ inboxes, linking to a video announcing the creation of “Organizing for America.” It seems to be the long awaited answer to speculation about how Obama would try and keep his grassroots volunteers engaged. Meanwhile, some people started to find impediments to social media plans for the White House. Through it all, technology evangelists did their part, continuing to spin out grand “Government 2.0″ utopias.

The best place to track these and the many other techno-political goings on is TechPresident, run by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry — both invaluable sources for my own story.

I’ll have more to write shortly here about what has happened vis-à-vis Obama’s digital strategies since the piece closed in December. First, however, a note of disclosure. Originally the piece contained a description of my own minimal participation in the campaign, part of a longer section on how Obama utilized tech to win the presidency. Eventually we decided that the role of tech in the campaign had been covered well elsewhere (most expertly by Jose Antonio Vargas at The Washington Post). So we focused the piece more on how Obama might use the same digital techniques to govern. The longer first person bit shrunk to the somewhat cryptic:

Those efforts were combined with massive database-crunching to identify potential voters who could be approached door-to-door by last-minute canvassers, myself included.

So to elaborate: in the four days leading up to the election, well before I got this assignment, I ditched the fig leaf of political journalistic objectivity, paid my own way to Colorado, and volunteered for the Obama campaign. I didn’t get paid, obviously, nor did I give money directly to the campaign, just time and feet. As a result, I got to experience his technology-fueled ground operation first-hand, which helped inform the later story.

So to the extent that you find skepticism in the Wired piece, it’s not driven by a burning anti-Obama ideology or political sour grapes. If by contrast you somehow infer an immense relief at Obama’s victory, a strong desire to see him succeed, and an underlying feeling that he will (although not in the way perhaps some tech pundits would like), well, you got it. Either way, I hope the reporting stands on its own. In the words of Dr. Thompson, “so much for Objective journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”