While much of the tech industry and blogosphere is pondering who President-elect Barack Obama might appoint as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer--Eric Schmidt? Jeff Bezos? Larry Lessig?--a bunch of heavy-hitting public interest groups in Washington and a couple of civic-minded techies out in Seattle have each launched promising interventions in the discussion.

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."