About the Open Government Initiative: http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/about

About the public participation period: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/02/23/make-your-voice-heard

I just learned about the Open Government Initiative last night.The OG Initiative was setup to improve the transparency of US government operations as well as provide a method for the public to influence govt operations. To achieve the latter, the govt opened up a window (Feb 23 - Mar 19) for the public to submit feedback (new new ideas, vote and comment on submitted ideas etc.) to any one of the numerous government agencies.

The deadline to submit this feedback is today! Each agency has a website where you can provide feedback (the links to these are in the blog post referenced above). For example, this is NASA's website: http://opennasa.ideascale.com/

I hear NASA has been quite receptive of the ideas submitted through its portal. One suggestion was that NASA support existing communities that are working on space-related ideas. NASA followed up quickly by providing funding for the SpaceUp barcamp: http://www.nasa.gov/open/spaceup.html