Background:<p>About the Open Government Initiative: http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/about<p>About the public participation period: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/02/23/make-your-voice-heard<p>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.<p>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/<p>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