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."

The conference season is heating up, and while we're not at TED or BIL or FRED*, Andrew, Josh and I will be busy over the next few weeks. Here are some highlights, including Politics Online, ETech, Freedom-to-Connect, the Social Computing Summit and Politics: Web 2.0.