A week ago, the Obama-Biden transition team solicited ideas for improving health care. Today, the team responded to our comments with a video from Tom Daschle (recently nominated for Secretary of Health & Human Services) and Lauren Aronson.

Is this video something that we tech-politics geeks should be excited about? I'm cautiously optimistic.

I think it's still too early to talk about how useful Twitter was during this week's Mumbai attacks. The tendency is to assume it was more powerful than it actually was; Om Malik's take is the only skeptical viewpoint I've found so far. But we can say that Twitter has had a great month. Here's an incomplete list of Twitter's organizational/democratic/self-governance accomplishments in November...

Finally, there's a high-profile politician with a Twitter feed worth following.

The Washington, DC government just procured 47 Web-based tools in 30 days, all for just $50,000.

This is good news in any year. But this year, it is a blessing.

Yet another reason for governments to use open source software: it promotes global standards. And a government's compliance to such standards, writes IBM's Bob Sutor, is emblematic of its commitment to its people.

Early last week, a federal judge ruled in favor of transparency advocates seeking to preserve a slew of poorly stored White House email.

Now, a ruling in a separate case makes this saga a bit murkier.

"Tech geeks are tickled that come January, one of their kind will be in the White House."

Very true. But what are we gonna do about it?

Due to a Monday court ruling, a set of backup tapes containing internal White House emails will survive the Bush Administration. This has big implications for the future of presidential transparency and history.

Government is not the enemy, writes guest author Matthew Burton, a technologist who consults for the intelligence community, as well as a transparency activist. It's time for the loose coalition of bloggers, web developers, engineers, activists, philanthropists and agitators who believe in government transparency, election reform and weakening the influence of lobbyists and big donors to change how government functions by actually going inside it and making direct change happen.

He writes: "We need a community of coders who are committed to improving the inner workings of DC, and doing it in a way that inherently promotes transparency while fighting government waste. We need a Mozilla Foundation for the government. A stateside Geekcorps. A geeky Americorps. An army of impassioned programmers committed to improving the government’s information services, both internal and those it provides to the public. It would make government more organized, accountable and effective, and it would save them a lot of tax dollars. And the result—open access to the code that runs our country—is a great first step toward the kind of government transparency we’re after."