Geek Gestalt

The entrance to Cheyenne Mountain, the former home of NORAD. Today, NORAD is based at Peterson Air Force Base, like Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado Springs, Colo.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

This is not your "War Games" fan's NORAD.

If the picture in your head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command's operations center is straight out of that 1983 Matthew Broderick movie, you may need to replace it.

That real-life command center, where personnel from the militaries of the United States and Canada keep a watchful eye out for threats from the sky, is no longer buried deep under Cheyenne Mountain. It is, however, still in Colorado Springs, Colo. Today, it is housed at Peterson Air Force Base, and it is a joint venture with the U.S. Northern Command known as the NORAD Integrated Command Center.

And befitting the sensitive nature of that facility, the public does not often get a look inside.

But earlier this week, NORAD changed that equation when it posted a video (see below) showing nearly three minutes of B-roll shot inside the Integrated Command Center. It's not the most exciting three minutes that ever happened in there, to be sure, but then again, it is NORAD.

NORAD, of course, is gearing up for its annual Christmas Eve Santa Claus tracking marathon. Starting Dec. 1, the NORAD Santa tracking Web site has been live, and has been offering up a series of games for kids, as well as some historical information about that program. Come back to this blog on Monday for a look behind the scenes of the NORAD Santa tracker.

Photos: Inside Cheyenne Mountain, America's Fortress

Beth Noveck is deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration. Her path to that role began with putting together the first academic conference on virtual worlds and led her to create what may be the first open social networking project in American government history, a re-working of the U.S. patent review process known as peer-to-patent.

(Credit: Flickr user Joi Ito)

Editor's note: This is the second in a series of articles discussing how people in the tech industry are working with or around federal and state governments.

Can you chart a logical path from a 2003 academic conference on the legal issues surrounding virtual worlds and online games to Barack Obama's first executive action as president?

Beth Noveck can.

If you're not familiar with her--and few outside her specific professional and social circles would be--Noveck, a 38-year-old lawyer originally from Toms River, N.J., is Obama's deputy chief technology officer for open government.

Precisely what "open government" means probably depends on whom you ask. But in her official role in the current presidential administration, Noveck framed it as an attempt to make our federal institutions embrace technology in a bid to share information with the public.

"Open government is the effort to create government institutions that are more transparent," Noveck explained, "that work more in the open and that provide information more readily online and in real time--and that are also more participatory."

On January 21, as many in Washington, D.C. were still shaking off hangovers from the inaugural parties the night before, Obama, in his first official action as president, signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open government, a short document that declared, "We shall work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government."

Noveck (see video below) was a principal contributor to the memorandum, and the first member of the Obama-Biden transition's Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform team, which advised the president-elect on ways to incorporate technology into his larger reform goals. So one could say that the new president's adoption of these concepts was a very high-profile validation of years of Noveck's work on a wide range of issues revolving around technology policy and using technology to help craft policy.

Indeed, her work over the years has won her not just an office in the White House, but the professional admiration and praise of some of the biggest names in technology.

"With a compelling blend of high theory and practical know-how," Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in a back-cover review of her 2009 book, "Wiki Government," "Beth Noveck explains how political institutions can directly engage the public to solve complex problems and create a better democracy."

Or, as former Xerox chief scientist John Seely Brown put it in talking about the "constitution" of new technological systems, Noveck "has a very long history of being one of the most advanced thinkers on how...you change institutions to make a big difference."

State of Play
Noveck earned a bachelor's degree at Harvard University and then both a law degree from Yale Law School and a doctoral degree from the University of Innsbruck. Throw in a fellowship at Oxford and it's easy to see that she was headed toward a career in academia. While she worked for a time as a telecommunications and Internet attorney, she eventually settled into a position on the faculty of New York Law School.

It was there that Noveck first began attracting public attention. In 2003, not long after the virtual worlds Second Life and There.com launched, and as massively multiplayer online games like Everquest were becoming established in the mainstream, Noveck put together the first State of Play conference as a place to talk about whether these relatively new digital fun houses might actually be used to help change the world.

"My supposition is that virtual worlds are going to be the best training ground for teaching the practices of democracy, not simply simulations that passively demonstrate something," Noveck said at the time. "They offer a playground for complex social interactions and collaborative decision making, according to a set of rules defined by the game space."

It might have been tempting to laugh, but Noveck's brainchild attracted lawyers and academics from some of the best schools in the country, eager to talk about what they saw as one of the newest and most exciting fields of study.

After all, outside of a few research papers and articles, almost no one had ever bothered to put any real thought into the idea that virtual worlds could foster real society, and all the legal, financial, intellectual, and social opportunities and problems that come along with that.

"It was the first conference that took virtual worlds seriously," said Dan Hunter, today a New York Law School legal studies professor, but back then at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "It felt like the Woodstock moment for all these people and...a catalyst for people to start writing about it and for people like me to start looking at the legal and governance side of it."

Added Hunter, Noveck "managed to realize what no one else had (understood) all that clearly, that there was an opportunity to bring people together, and that there was a nascent movement there....(That) was kind of characteristic of her. She's really fast at picking up on movements and ideas people can come together around."

Peer to patent
For Noveck, being the prime instigator of a burgeoning intellectual field of study was a career boost. But it was likely another big move of hers that got her to the big time.

In 2005, still at New York Law School and still running State of Play, she began thinking about a different, though related, set of issues.

In her Introduction to Intellectual Property course, she put students through a grueling look at the American patent law process. One glaring hole, she knew, was that while the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office employs thousands of trained examiners, few are versed in the cutting edge of technology and scientific research.

"(An examiner) does not necessarily have a Ph.D. in science, and there is little opportunity on the job for continuing education," Noveck wrote in "Wiki Government." "As an expert in patent examination, she is not and is not expected to be a master of all areas of innovation."

This problem clearly bothered Noveck, and it was partly responsible for a huge backlog causing lengthy delays in the patent review process.

Inspired, Noveck crafted a blog post, Peer- to-Patent: A Modest Proposal, in which she argued forcefully that the patent review system was woefully broken and that if social software--a fairly new concept in 2005--was applied to the process, it could make the system work better. Wouldn't it be better for countless experts to weigh in on applications rather than a single examiner, she argued?

The idea, like so many others born in blog posts, might have died there. But, alerted to her groundbreaking idea, a top IBM intellectual property attorney contacted her and asked to talk. This was no small development. IBM is the Patent Office's single biggest client, receiving more than 3,000 patents a year. If Big Blue thought there was something to her idea, she had found the right partner.

A little IBM grant money later, Noveck found herself pursuing the project and, she wrote in her book, "running the government's first open social networking project."

Other corporate titans followed IBM's lead: First Microsoft, then Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and others. Each offered to submit their patents applications through Peer-to-Patent, and to provide funding. On June 15, 2007, Peer-to-Patent went live as an official U.S. Patent Office pilot project.

Now, the Patent Office is studying the pilot's results. And while it's not clear what the outcome will be, it is certain that Noveck continues to have friends in the right places, in this case, the new director of the Patent Office, David Kappos, who had served as the chair of the steering committee for Peer-to-Patent.

Open Government
As someone with a core belief--and the record to prove it--that technology can help re-shape government, Noveck decided to get involved in the 2008 presidential election as a very early volunteer for the Barack Obama campaign. Through a friend, Seth Harris, who was helping the campaign on labor and employment and disabilities issues--and who is now the deputy secretary of labor--Noveck found herself in a position, and with the access, to apply her unique set of skills.

"He knew that I knew a lot about technology and technology in government, in particular," Noveck recalled, "and helped to make the introduction so that I could share (that) expertise both on the issue of how to use technology in the campaign...and also how we think about technology and governance and the open government work that we are doing now to help shape that agenda."

Noveck speaking with Tim O'Reilly at the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

(Credit: O'Reilly Conferences)

Clearly, her efforts were appreciated--and rewarded. And the rest is history.

On December 8, 2009, the Obama administration's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra and chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, held a live Web cast to formally announce out the Open Government directive. Stemming from the president's January 21 executive action, the directive spelled out the administration's philosophy on achieving openness, transparency and collaboration.

It called for, among other things, each federal agency making publicly available, within 45 days, three "high-value" data sets; that within 60 days, the White House will launch an online dashboard intended to hold each agency accountable for the contents of the directive; and that within 120 days, each agency will create its own open government plan geared toward meeting the directive's philosophies.

Examples of projects the administration hopes for that are already in the works are an Army program under which its personnel can use wikis to collaboratively recraft the service's field manuals, and a Federal Aviation Administration program which made flight departure data publicly available, enabling a member of the public to build an iPhone app that lets people see the most accurate departure and arrival information.

Though many people worked on the directive, Kundra and Chopra named, and praised, only one: Noveck. To observers of the administration's open government efforts, this doubtless came as no surprise.

"It's clear that they have very firm intentions and that the administration does have a commitment to making very fundamental changes," said John Wonderlich, the policy director at the watchdog organization the Sunlight Foundation. "One of the ways we can see their commitment is that they have brought on someone like Beth to serve as a central point of contact for transparency issues."

Wonderlich also pointed to Noveck's Peer-to-Patent work as proof of her understanding of how to incorporate technology and wide public involvement in at least attempting to make government work better for the people at large.

Out-of-the-Beltway thinking to the Beltway
One reason she may be succeeding in government is that she's seen to be bringing new thinking to stodgy Washington.

"The deal is that she's bringing this...out-of-the-Beltway thinking to the Beltway," said Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who has worked with Noveck since Obama took office on open government issues involving the federal Veterans Administration. "She's one of the hubs of this, people who see how things work in Washington and see how things work in Silicon Valley, and bringing the best of both."

So how does all her work tie together? For Noveck, it begins with the evolution of three-dimensional visual technologies and the question of how to apply technological innovations for the greater public good.

"State of Play was always intended to be a look at whatever the latest tools are that help us to understand how we can collaborate and work together in a peaceful fashion," Noveck said. "And that's really the essence of what our political institutions do: create vehicles for us to work together to solve collective public problems....And for me, it's a very direct path from that set of ideas, that informed the creation of those conferences, to the development of the Peer-to-Patent platform for getting people involved in the patent process, to now, creating a national agenda on open government, and trying to bring together the technology worlds and the world of government institutions to improve the way we make decisions for all of our benefit."

The video game industry just keeps on seeing its sales numbers decline, in spite of a huge month for Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and the crucial holiday month of November was no different than the last nine months of 2009. For the month, according to industry analyst The NPD Group, sales across the entire video game business were $2.7 billion, down 7.6 percent from $2.92 billion a year earlier.

Yet, NPD added, industry-wide sales were so high in 2008 that even despite this November's significant drop, the month was still the second-best November on record. "I think we all have to realize the incredible year that was 2008," wrote NPD analyst Anita Frazier, in a research report.

Winning the month, yet again, at least in console sales, was Nintendo's Wii, with 1.26 million units sold. That's significantly more than the 1.1 million units that Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter predicted late last month, in the wake of Black Friday, that Nintendo would sell. Microsoft saw its Xbox 360 take a solid second place with 819,500 units sold, and Sony's PlayStation 3 brought up the rear with 710,400 consoles moved.

Despite a big year-over-year jump in PS3 sales, those numbers had to be disappointing for Sony. The PS3 had finished ahead of the Xbox in October and September, mainly as a result of the pent-up demand for the machine in the wake of its mid-August price cut to $299.

For the Wii, first place is nothing new, and it's clear that consumers had a bigger hunger for that console than its competitors' offerings. But while 1.26 million units sold is impressive, it's quite a bit lower than the 2.04 million Wiis that sold last November, even given the fact that Nintendo lowered the price of the Wii from $249 to $199 in September.

"Nintendo products top Amazon.com's most wished for and most gifted lists for video games, and Wii remains at or near the top of the most-searched for video game terms on Yahoo," Nintendo said in a statement. "As families and friends gather for the holidays, Nintendo games offer the best shared experiences."

Microsoft saw sales of the Xbox drop 2 percent, from 836,000 last year to 819,500 this year. But Xbox spokesperson David Dennis said overall, last month was the best November in the Xbox 360's history, in terms of dollars spent across the board.

Though it did finish in third place, the PS3's sales were through the roof compared to last year, almost certainly due to the price cut. Sony's sales of 710,400 PS3s was up 87.9 percent from last November's poor showing of just 378,000 units.

Indeed, Sony touted that big jump, though without mentioning the recent price decrease of the PS3. "In November, PS3 was the only hardware console to see any growth when compared to last November," the company wrote in a press release, "experiencing an (87.9) percent lift and a 122 percent increase from the previous month."

On the software side, it was pretty clear that the Xbox--with four of the top 10 best-selling games on that platform, compared to two for the PS3 and four for the Wii--was November's big winner. That was no more clear than in sales of the biggest game title of the year, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which broke the single-day record for sales for any entertainment product when it launched November 10, and was expected to make up a fifth of all games sales in November. The Xbox dominated sales of the game, with 4.2 million units sold, while just 1.87 million were sold for the PS3.

Dennis said the reason for that was clear: "It's Xbox Live," Dennis said. "People's friends are on Xbox Live, and you buy the version of the game where your friends are."

On Tuesday morning, the Obama administration formally unveiled its Open Government directive, an effort aimed at weaving the philosophies of openness, transparency and participation into the DNA of the federal government and its agencies.

That directive comes as a direct result of President Barack Obama's first executive action, on January 21, only hours after the hoopla from his inaugural parade and parties had died down, when the new chief executive issued the so-called Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.

Beth Noveck, director of the Obama administration's open-government efforts

(Credit: New York Law School)

That document, which began, "My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government," was a forceful opening move by the new president, and one intended to make good on his campaign call for reform and openness.

For Beth Noveck, Obama's deputy chief technology officer for open government and a principal contributor to both the original Open Government memo and Tuesday's formal directive, this is more than just a chance to watch the new administration attempt to reverse decades of ingrained government reticence at letting the public get too close to policy discussions. It is also a chance to take a stab at changing the world.

Noveck, who for years has been a faculty member at New York Law School, had begun volunteering for the Obama campaign in early 2007, offering up her expertise in technology policy and in how to use technology to make policy. And when Obama won the 2008 presidential election, she quickly became the first member of what was known as the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform team, which was focused on thinking about how to actually bring about open government.

She's an accomplished law professor, and someone who gained some notoriety as the organizer of the State of Play conferences, which examined the legal, social, and intellectual issues surrounding virtual worlds and online games. But Noveck may have best secured her place in the Obama campaign and, later, the administration, with her groundbreaking work on the Peer to Patent project. That effort--which began in 2005 and became the subject of Noveck's 2009 book, "Wiki Government"--was aimed at applying the expertise of individual members of the public to the vastly overworked U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Today, Noveck is the director of the administration's open-government efforts, and was the one person that the administration's Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra called out by name during their Tuesday event to unveil the directive. Last week, she spoke with CNET about that role, about what her major goals are while in Washington, and about why transparency, collaboration and participation are so important to government working better for the American people.

Q: Describe, in your own words, what Open Government is, and what the administration's goals are for it?
Beth Noveck: Open Government is the effort to create government institutions that are more transparent--that work more in the open and that provide information more readily online and in real time--and that are also more participatory, engaging people in how government makes decisions and policies, earlier in the process, and with the benefit of input from more and more widespread stakeholders, not just people in Washington. And the role of government becomes more collaborative, working together across government institutions, and then across levels of government.

This is something that is pretty much possible today because of the Internet, correct?
Noveck: Absolutely. There have been efforts in every generation to bring about government reform, to create government that works better and more efficiently. But what's really a sea change today is that technology is making available this kind of open collaboration that we've never had before. Now we can get more information up as close to real time as possible and make it available not just on the Internet, but make it available so people can download it, look at that data, mash up that data, and derive greater meaning from it, and hopefully also, hold government more accountable as a result.

What makes you think that the public is ready for this kind of opportunity?
Noveck: Previously, you had only a few ways in which you could engage with government. You could vote in an election. Maybe you could write a comment in response to a rule that a federal agency might put out, like what's the appropriate fuel efficiency for trucks. You could write a letter to your Congressman. Now what we see is the opportunity to do things like get involved in a policy forum, not just by writing a comment that you have to mail to a federal agency in Washington, but by much more easily and quickly responding to a discussion about information technology in health care, and electronic health care records on a Health and Human Services Department blog. You may, for example, have technical skills and take some of the data that's being made available on Data.gov, like the flight record data that the FAA is putting out, and make an iPhone app that allows consumers to track when flights are on time. Which someone did.

The process you're in is not finished yet. What have you achieved so far with the Open Government initiative?
Noveck: We're by no means finished. And what we've been able to achieve is to transition from something that was the work of a handful of White House offices to something that is really the work of every single official across the government. Now, we are moving towards an open-government directive, which will instruct every government agency to be more transparent, participatory, and collaborative according to these specific milestones and instructions. And what we're seeing is that across the government, every department and agency has begun already to undertake initiatives to put more data up online, to begin to consult the public in new ways and to get the public engaged in policymaking in new ways, to use new technology to undertake collaboration, and competitions, and initiatives like, for example, Health and Human Services running a competition to design the best public-safety announcement in connection with the H1N1 flu vaccine.

Do you think that this culture shift will become permanent?
Noveck: This is really core to the president's vision of government. This points to the ability to use new technology to hard-wire this kind of reform and accountability into the culture of government so that it can't be undone in the next administration, so that we're not simply asking for data transparency now and then we're going to go back eight years from now. Really, the idea is when you're using technology to put information up online, it becomes very hard to take it offline without people noticing it.

Your work was pretty evident in the president's memorandum, correct?
Noveck: We had something called the Technology Innovation Reform Team--which was focused on how do we actually think about bringing innovation into government--as one of the core planning groups that was created during the transition in order to focus on such issues as open government. I was the initial member of that team, and that helped to produce a lot of the early work that we've done, including the creation of the role of a chief technology officer, the creation of a whole set of policies and projects that we've been undertaking over the course of the early stage of the administration. We all worked as a team.

On a personal level, can you talk about what it's been like to work in the White House?
Noveck: This is without a doubt the greatest honor and the greatest challenge of my professional career. Even for someone who likes to be busy and likes to multitask, working in the White House is an unbelievable challenge because of the range of issues that we deal with on a daily basis. It means that I'm working on a Health and Human Services issue at 9 o'clock and at 10 o'clock, talking to the Department of Labor, at 11 o'clock, I'm talking to the Department of Education. The advantage to that kind of breadth is the ability to help foster collaboration and knowledge exchange across department and agencies, so we can say to the Department of Education, this is what Health and Human Services is doing to bring innovation to the way they work. Or, Department of Labor, here's what's going on in some other area of government. So that ability to be at kind of the intersection of information exchange is incredibly valuable.

What is the status today of Peer to Patent?
Noveck: The Peer to Patent team did its own assessment after a two-year pilot, and now the Patent Office is studying it. The chair of the steering committee for Peer to Patent, is now the new undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property and the director of the Patent Office, David Kappos, so he is very much a friend of the concept of citizen engagement and participation in Patent Office practice, and so now the office just has to assess for itself how they are going to institutionalize the concept of citizen engagement and participation in the work that they do.

Stepping back to earlier in your career, can you talk about the connective tissue between your work with the State of Play conferences and what you're doing now?
Noveck: Over the last decade, we've seen the evolution of three-dimensional visual technologies and the question is how do we take the latest technological innovations and apply them to the betterment and strengthening of our democracy? State of Play was always intended to be a look at whatever the latest tools are that help us to understand how we can collaborate and work together in a peaceful fashion. And that's really the essence of what our political institutions do: Create vehicles for us to work together to solve collective public problems and to do so in peaceful ways and ways informed by the best quality information. And for me, it's a very direct path from that set of ideas, that informed the creation of those conferences, to the development of the Peer to Patent platform for getting people involved in the patent process, to now, creating a national agenda on open government, and trying to bring together the technology worlds and the world of government institutions to improve the way we make decisions for all of our benefit.

A screen shot of the Webcast with Obama administration CTO Aneesh Chopra (left) and CIO Vivek Kundra (center) formally unveiling the Open Government Directive.

(Credit: Whitehouse.gov)

The Obama administration on Tuesday officially unveiled its Open Government directive, a document that charges each federal agency with making high value data publicly available and with quickly coming up with formal open government plans.

The announcement follows up on President Obama's first executive act--the issuing on January 21 of his Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. That document set forth, among other things, that, "We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government."

The administration's Chief Information Officer Aneesh Chopra and Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra on Tuesday appeared together in a live Webcast to spell out the new directive and to answer questions from the public. The event seemed audience-appropriate in that it was extremely informal and questions were being fed to them from a colleague who pulled them off of Twitter.

Among the major points of the directive (PDF), it:

• Requires federal agencies to make a minimum of three "high-value" data sets available within 45 days. An example, they said, was data that was released on Data.gov earlier this year by the Federal Aviation Administration about the on-time performance of commercial airline flights, and which was subsequently used by a member of the public to create Flyontime.us.

• Directs that within 60 days, the White House will launch a dashboard on Whitehouse.gov that will be used to hold each agency accountable for the contents of the directive.

• Commits each federal agency to launching its own open government Web site.

• Says that within 90 days, agencies will receive guidance from the federal Office of Management and Budget about creating challenges and contests for how best to use publicly available data.

• And mandates that within 120 days, each agency will create an open government plan geared towards ensuring that the philosophies of openness, transparency, and collaboration are permanently "hardwired."

Note: Please click here for an interview with Beth Noveck, the Obama administration's deputy chief technology officer for open government, a principal contributor to the new directive.

In announcing the directive, which was posted Tuesday morning by OMB Director Peter Orszag, Chopra said there were three key themes that everyone involved in putting it together had sought to achieve. First, that the directive reflected Obama's priorities and put the open government initiative into the hands of the executive branch. Second, that those involved have been and will be working together as a team with stakeholders at the federal level, in state and local governments, and with the public. And third, that the directive is focused on results. In other words, he said, Obama has "called on us" to deliver.

For the most part, supporters of open government initiatives seem pleased by the release of the directive. While some had previously expressed concern that the Obama administration was taking too long in issuing the directive, the same people expressed their satisfaction with what Chopra and Kundra talked about Tuesday morning.

"Now that we've seen it, we are very excited," said John Wonderlich, policy director at the Washington, D.C.-based Sunlight Foundation. "They're really taking on a lot of initiatives and doing so in an aggressive fashion. We couldn't have written it better ourselves. It's very ambitious."

Similarly, Patrice McDermott, the director of OpenTheGovernment.org, another Washington, D.C.-based watchdog organization, said she was "pleasantly surprised" by the announcement and the contents of the directive, particularly the elements of it which formally spell out in detail the open government plan each agency has to create and put up on its Web site.

For example, McDermott said she was happy about components of the plan addressing compliance with records management and Freedom of Information Act backlogs. As well, she cited a provision that would require agencies with classified material to post a link to a publicly-available Web page where the public can learn about declassification procedures. "That's quite unusual and quite new," McDermott said.

During their announcement, Chopra and Kundra addressed one of the most common questions about the directive, that of how it would ensure that neither national security nor personal privacy are endangered by the open government efforts.

"Central [to the plan] is that it in no way compromises national security [or privacy]," said Kundra. "It may make sense, for example, to release a data set...[that] when combined with other data, creates a concern about security and privacy. We need to make sure we have proper concerns for privacy, confidentiality, and national security. That's part of the directive itself."

The two also responded enthusiastically to a question about whether the directive will trickle down to state and local government. "We highly encourage state and local [governments] to consider the same [kind of] directives," said Chopra. "This is a key pillar of public sector work and we hope this will be a helpful tool" for state and local governments.

Kundra added that when Data.gov, an earlier Obama administration effort to post federal agency data online, went live, the cities of New York and San Francisco, as well as the state of Massachusetts and even the United Kingdom quickly adopted similar programs.

Concerns about oversight
While McDermott praised the directive, she also voiced some concern that Chopra and Kundra didn't adequately spell out who would have oversight over the agencies' adoption of it, and how it would be enforced.

"The agencies are all each required to put up these open government plans," McDermott said, "but there's no indication of who's going to oversee [them] and oversee [their] implementation and the quality of their implementation. It's as if the OMB is expecting the public to do this."

But Wonderlich said he's not too worried about oversight or enforcement. In fact, he sounded satisfied with the notion that the very public nature of the program, and its specific provisions, would indeed mean that it would be the public that would be overseeing the program.

"I think you can interpret this as a management directive, or a White House directive," said Wonderlich. "There's a big dose of public scrutiny to require them to do it."

Still, Wonderlich was not completely convinced that the directive answers every question and concern his organization has had about the administration's open government plans.

"My main concern," he said, "is whether they're going to live up to everything they're taking on. There will be a lot of agency push back. It's up to all of us. It's not going to be an easy situation, so it's going to take work."

I love tools that are all about providing people with information they want, and on Tuesday, the video game industry's official ratings board got my attention with something awfully useful.

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) announced on Tuesday its new iPhone app, which is designed to put the board's full written summaries of more than 2,500 video games right at parents' fingertips.

A new iPhone app from the Entertainment Software Ratings Board allows parents to see the full ratings summaries of more than 1,500 video games.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

The idea is that with the app--officially called ESRB Rating, and available now, for free, in Apple's App Store--parents can punch in the name of any game rated by the board after July 1, 2008, and see not just the official rating--such as "M" for those 17 and up, or "E" for everyone--but the ESRB's full written summary of the title. The ESRB began writing the full summaries on July 1, 2008. Users of the app can also search for information about titles from before that date, but they will see only the basic letter rating and a brief content description.

Just over a year ago, the ESRB began making those summaries available to the public through its Web site, and through a mobile site (m.esrb.org). But the Web site isn't convenient to a parent who is actually out shopping for junior, and the mobile site is not something that many people who have standard cell phones will use, especially if they have to pay extra for data. An iPhone app is just so much easier.

Brilliant on-the-fly tools
Add this app, then, to the growing list of tools available for the iPhone and other smartphones that give consumers the ability to arm themselves with the most information about products and pricing while they actually have boots in the Best Buy, so to speak. Others include the brilliant SnapTell, which delivers comparative pricing information about books, DVDs, video games, and other items from sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Gamespot, and others based solely on a photograph, and RedLaser, which scans items' bar codes and delivers similar pricing information.

But what makes the ESRB app so terrific, it seems to me, is that it provides parents with exactly the kind of nuanced information they need to properly choose the kinds of games they want to buy for their kids. Sure, the basic letter rating gives some context--if you're concerned about violence or racy content, you probably want to stay away from "M"-rated games--but within a single rating category, there is still a wide spectrum of content.

For example, the hottest game in the world right now is Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The game has an "M" rating, but that just doesn't say all that much. Reading the summary, though, a parent can see much more: "Realistic gunfire, explosions, and cries of pain are heard during the frequent and fast-paced combat. The most intense depiction of violence occurs during a 'No Russian' mission where players take on the role of an undercover Ranger: Several civilians are gunned down at an airport as players are given a choice to participate in the killings (e.g., players can shoot a wounded civilian that is crawling on the ground), or walk by and observe without opening fire."

The app arms parents with the information to make informed buying decisions.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

That's a little more informative than "M," isn't it.

To be sure, kids are going to be able to get the games they want regardless of what their parents buy them. But given that games can cost $60 apiece--at least for the AAA console games--it may be that they don't quite have the means to sneak off with each and every first-person shooter they desire. They may still be dependent on Santa Claus, aka their parents, to get them the bulk of their games.

And, of course, those buyers who don't have an iPhone still will have to struggle to access these summaries, and it's unlikely that retailers will be providing them in any useful form.

But all in all, I find this precisely the kind of thing that puts the power over decisions about which video games to buy right back where it belongs: in parents' hands. We are in an age where so many pundits, politicians, and others are moaning and whining about the breakdown of society, and parents are complaining about the corruption of their children.

Well, complain no more: If you've got an iPhone--and I certainly hope the ESRB puts this app out for Android and other smartphones soon--you can do the research yourself. And then if you're still unhappy about the content in the games you buy your kids, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Corrected at 12:50 p.m. PST: This story incorrectly reported how many games rated by the ESRB would have summaries available through the iPhone app. It is more than 1,500.

Microsoft on Monday said that millions of Xbox Live members have used the new social-media features that the company pushed live a week ago.

In June, Microsoft announced it would begin offering Xbox Live users access to Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm. And while the manifestation of each of those services is scaled down on Xbox Live, the rollout has been one of the company's big pushes this fall for its hugely popular online system.

According to Microsoft spokesman David Dennis, the first-week figures show that at least 2 million Xbox Live users have logged into Facebook, and that half a million Last.fm accounts were created in the first 24 hours of availability. Dennis didn't address how many Xbox Live users have used the service's Twitter feature, except to say that there have been "tweets from nearly every market where we have Xbox Live."

So, based on the data Dennis provided, the Facebook integration with Xbox Live has had the most adoption. And while 2 million people logging into Facebook is far short of the 20 million total Xbox Live users, it is notable that fully one tenth of the service's users have tried the Facebook feature in just the first week.

Still, there's no way to know if the numbers of members using the social-media features will climb higher. There are those who feel that the Facebook and Twitter implementations lack some of the richness that has led to those services' phenomenal growth, and one has to wonder how many Xbox Live users will choose to spend time with Facebook or Twitter instead of doing things like watching movies or playing games.

As for Last.fm, Dennis said that in the first week, Xbox Live users had streamed 120 million minutes of music. Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET.

Lastly, Dennis said that 1.7 million Xbox Live users had gone to the new Zune marketplace--formerly known as the Xbox Live marketplace--and watched video.

A photo of a meeting between a participant in Must Love Robots, a small-scale alternate-reality game put on recently by the New York duo, Awkward Hug, and the game's signature robot.

(Credit: Flickr user Tim Scribbles)

For Kiaya Steele, the men in suits and dark glasses who appeared suddenly through the raindrops of a New Hampshire morning were the first sign that something very unusual was going on.

One of the men stood under an umbrella next to the car Steele and her friend Kellin had been riding in moments earlier and delivered a message. As Kelli's sister Jenna was brought out of a second car that had pulled up mysteriously behind them, Steele was told that if she couldn't quickly prove that she was "the real Kiaya," the bomb planted inside Jenna would explode.

And this was just the tip of the iceberg of a day spent driving all around the countryside, complete with vans, staple guns, cameramen in trees, threats, red phone booths, and a series of hidden clues.

But this wasn't a situation for the FBI. Rather, it was a very small-scale--and low-tech--version of what is known as an alternate-reality game, an entertainment genre that has grown in popularity in recent years, especially because its traditional use of mixed-media--the Web, cell phones, social media, and others--can allow large numbers of people to play together collaboratively.

Over the years, the games have become a favorite marketing tool of large companies like Microsoft, which has commissioned huge ARGs, as they're known, for the launches of things like the video game Halo 2 and Windows Vista. Indeed, the first widely known ARG was called The Beast, and was used as a promotion for the release of the Steven Spielberg film "AI: Artificial Intelligence."

Those versions of ARGs have seven-figure budgets and allow thousands of people to participate. Yet while they get most of the ink written about ARGs, there has long been a steady stream of games built for very small audiences or, as in the case of Steele and the friend with a "bomb" insider her, an audience of one. It turned out that the intrigue was all part of a day-long mystery concocted by Steele's boyfriend, and involving several of their friends, as part of an elaborate marriage proposal.

"We use a lot of fictional analogies in our lives--gangsters in an alley (and) later in the quest there was a Soviet scientist, all themes that had played out in our courtship," Steele recalled. "We would write stories of sorts to one another before we dated. We'd take an image and run with it until it was too tired to move anymore. The whole thing was kind of a collaboration of our lives together."

Given that the game Steele's new fiance planned for his proposal had such a small audience, it was, to be sure, at the extreme end of the size and complexity spectrum for ARGs. But at any given moment, there are several ARGs being played that have slightly larger, yet still very small, numbers of participants. And it is these games, usually carried out at minimal expense and with no deep-pocketed sponsor, that may well be the true lifeblood of the increasingly popular world of ARGs.

And while there are practical limits to the kinds of interactions that are possible between the people running the larger games--the so-called puppetmasters--and the players, these smaller adventures offer everyone involved a much greater chance at direct communication.

"There are quite a few people making [small] ARGs, either without profit in mind or marketing [who are] saying, 'Look at me, I can do this,'" said Michael Andersen, who runs ARGNet, the leading source for news and information about the genre. "The motivations for a lot of these things vary. [One] advantage of doing these grassroots games is working for yourself. [And], it becomes a lot easier to have those one-on-one interactions [and the] feeling that not only can you communicate, but you can change what's going on" for fans.

Robot love
Earlier this year, a New York duo calling themselves Awkward Hug built and pulled off a small-scale ARG called Must Love Robots, which was centered around the idea of helping make love connections between people and robots.

Through a series of Web sites, social media, YouTube videos and more, Awkward Hug founders Jim Babb and Tanner Ringerud turned a $3,000 budget into a 3-month-long game with at least 300 participants.

Babb said that the project, which was entirely self-funded, came out of an original desire to create a Web series about a robot. But when the two realized that they could "make it so much more" by adding the various multimedia elements, they set out to build a bona fide ARG, one that would allow them to communicate directly with almost anyone who wanted to talk with them, even to the point of playing online games of Scrabble. And, of course, there were real-world meetings between prospective "dates" and the game's signature robot (see video below).

Given the huge gap in size between a large-scale ARG and something like Must Love Robots, it might be surprising that many of the ultimate goals are the same. It certainly was to Babb.

"What surprised me the most," Babb said, was that "players want more and they want to do things with you. It becomes a collaboration. The audience becomes characters."

And while it's not always possible for everyone to participate in person--Must Love Robots attracted players from around the world--one of the great things about the ARG genre is how many people who play do participate directly in one way or another. In Babb and Ringerud's game, for example, 20 people created costumes related to the story line and sent in pictures of themselves wearing the outfits, all of which were intended to be folded into the larger story line.

Kids creators
A different kind of small-scale ARG was Find Chesia, a project put on by the Finksburg, Md., library on behalf of its local schoolchildren and their summer reading program.

The story, said organizer Heather Owings, was centered on the story of Chesia, a 14-year-old girl whose parents have gone missing on an archaeological dig and who sets out to find them. The game was designed by five small teams of 11- to 15-year-olds.

Like with many small-scale ARGs, Find Chesia encountered a series of structural problems, most notably, Owings said, the fact that the kids turned out to be resistant--mainly due to regular conditioning about the dangers of online anonymity--to the idea of posting information in character to the game's Web site. In addition, there was the unforeseen problem that almost none of the kids were old enough to drive to the game's real-world locations.

This bracelet is an important element in the ARG, Finding Chesia, which was put on by a Maryland library on behalf of a town's schoolchildren and their summer reading program.

(Credit: Finding Chesia)

Still, the game was successful enough for Owings to want to run the game again next summer, incorporating some of the lessons they learned this year. And despite the problems, Owings said that she came away with an appreciation for what the ARG genre can offer its organizers and participants.

"I like that ARGs use tools that were set up to do something else, and they're used to create something new," Owings said. "It's the taking of something and changing it and using it for something it wasn't intended [for] in a new and creative way."

Plus, she said, Finding Chesia turned out to be a perfect way to get the kids in on the enjoyment of building their own game, even though they lacked many of the skills generally considered necessary for such a task.

"It's a way for teens to create their own game," Owings said, "and we really enjoyed that aspect of it...They don't need to be computer programmer [and] here is a way for them to take ownership for creating a game on a fairly small level. [As well, it] helps them to realize how much the Internet does facilitate networking within the community, as well as outside the community."

These days, said ARGNet's Andersen, there are at least as many small, grassroots ARGs being produced as the larger, corporate-backed games. And those numbers could grow as an increasing number of people become versed in the tools for building them. According to Andersen, teachers at the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Mary Washington are both teaching classes about ARGs.

But the real upside in the genre's growth will come naturally, as more people in more local communities get exposed to ARGs and discover the joy of playing something truly interactive and truly collaborative.

And while it's true that most small ARGs quickly peter out as players and organizers discover that they don't have the time or energy to follow through, there are those who feel that the ultimate payoff of participating is there for anyone with the stamina or commitment to grab it.

"For an independent ARG, the most successful thing you can do is complete it and have your core audience go all the way through," said Awkward Hug's Babb. "It's such a cool format, and the people who can make it through a whole one of these get an experience that no other media can provide."

Update (5:50 p.m.): This story has been updated with a statement from Microsoft.

It's oh-so enticing: you find a copy of a brand new game like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on a pirate site and the temptation to download it is too strong.

Well, that temptation may have cost up to 1 million users of Microsoft's Xbox Live the ability to use that service. According to a report in InformationWeek, Microsoft has banned as many as a million players from Xbox Live for altering their consoles in order to play pirated versions of games.

This week, Activision's new Call of Duty was released, and InformationWeek speculated that because pirated versions of the game appeared on various sharing sites in advance of the release, the game's developer may have exhorted Microsoft to enact the bans.

"Xbox 360 consoles are equipped with digital rights management technologies designed to detect pirated software," InformationWeek wrote, "but some players have successfully 'modded,' or modified, their machines to circumvent DRM protections."

Even if someone has been banned, their Xbox will still play offline games, InformationWeek said. But it's not at all clear if the bans are permanent or if Microsoft will allow those who have been booted from Xbox Live to return at some point down the line.

In a statement Microsoft said its "commitment to combat piracy and support safer and more secure gameplay for the more than 20 million members of the Xbox Live community remains a top priority. All consumers should know that piracy is illegal and modifying their Xbox 360 console violates the Xbox Live terms of use, will void their warranty and result in a ban from Xbox Live. We can assure you that if an Xbox Live member follows the Xbox Live terms of use, purchased a retail copy of Modern Warfare 2 and played the game on an unmodified Xbox 360, no action will be taken."

And on the Xbox support page, Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry Hryb, aka Major Nelson, has addressed some of the circumstances that could lead to a player's being banned.

"Players who find their Gamertags banned from Xbox Live have wound up in that situation due to violations of the Xbox Live Terms of Use," Major Nelson wrote. "The Xbox Live team monitors players for not just cheating, but also for things like threats, racism, profanity, and just being an all around poor sport and ruining the game for others.

"When a Gamertag comes up as violating our policies for online behavior, the person who owns that Gamertag is punished by being banned from the service. Keep in mind, this isn't just a ban on a particular game. This is a ban on the Xbox Live service as a whole, so you won't be able to go online at all during your ban. Initially, you may be banned for a day, a week, or depending on severity, permanently! Kiss that $50 goodbye."