A few updates on U.S. President Barack Obama’s first days in office:

• One of the last updates to Change.gov, Obama’s transition site, was a video about the transition’s Technology, Innovation and Government Reform working group, which discusses OA to public sector information and alludes favorably to the open data aspects of the Human Genome Project. (Thanks to techPresident.)
• Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, was confirmed by the Senate and took office. (See our past post about Chu’s OA connection.)
• The new WhiteHouse.gov includes terms that third-party content on the site will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. (U.S. government content is already in the public domain.) See also Michael Geist’s comparison to the terms of Canada’s Prime Minister’s site.
• Obama’s WhiteHouse.gov also allows more spidering (and archiving) than the previous tenant’s. See also the comments at techPresident and the Center for Democracy and Technology.
• An early Obama memo on the Freedom of Information Act states that beyond responding to public requests for information, “agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public”. Another early memo addresses transparency and open government. See comments by the Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sunlight Foundation, and American Library Association.