By the end of today, the Bush administration will have published a flood of new regulations, pushing them into the 60-day pipeline that gets them enacted just before the Obama administration takes office. The blowback on these “midnight regulations” centers on the minimal opportunity for the public to review and provide input into the process. The speed with which these rules have been shoved through mocks public participation: the Interior Department reportedly had 15 experts, in 32 hours, filter over 200,000 comments on proposed relaxation of the Endangered Species Act. Unsurprisingly, the final rules are little-changed from the original proposal.

Can new technologies, and new techniques for applying technology, address this problem?

Obama Campaign's Trickle Down Belief in the Bottom Up; GOP Insurgents Stump for the Fierce Urgency of Getting Wired Now; Political Discourse, YouTube-Style; Huh, Looks Like Facebook Really Can Get You a Job; Fixing the FCC Begins at Home (Page); The Most Depressing Tweet You'll Get All Day; Summit on Social Networking for Social Change; and more.

The folks who gave us ObamaCTO.org, which has attracted thousands of participants in a conversation about the priorities for Obama's Chief Technology Officer, have branched out and added a new forum for debating options for the future of Obama's movement. It's early in the process, and as I reported yesterday, organizers are meeting in Chicago now to try to hammer out the answer to this question. On http://ideas.obamacto.org/pages/obama_movement you can add your own suggestions and vote on the ones already there. This could get interesting...

The Washington Post is out tonight with the really big numbers on the Obama campaign's success online. And email is still the killer app.

The Guardian UK has collected hundreds of striking photo messages to Barack Obama on their Deadline USA blog. All it took was setting up a Flickr group and inviting people share their thoughts in photo form. More than 800 messages have since poured in. Some had some general words of advice for the President-elect:

(Photo credit: lorenabuena)

They'd Check the "It's Complicated" Box; The Oppositional Approach to Getting from Here to Five Million; Transition's Tech Team Taps Beltway and Beyond; Government Guide to Marijuana (Vendors); Nanobama, the Microscopic President; DC's Apps Contest Names Winners; Progressives' Annual Participatory Debrief; and more.

Monday I was up at Harvard to give a talk to Nicco Mele's class at the Institute of Politics on "The Making of the President 2.0: How the Internet is Changing the Political Game." (The powerpoint is here.) While I was there, I was fortunate to get an hour with Marshall Ganz, who teaches public policy at the Kennedy School and is attached to the Hauser Center on Nonprofit Organizations. Ganz is a giant in the field of community organizing, with seminal experience going back to the civil rights movement and working with Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers. More important for the present moment, Ganz was the architect of Barack Obama's grassroots organizing juggernaut. He played a central role in the "Camp Obama" training sessions--three-day intensive workshops attended by something like 23,000 local organizers--and his teachings on the theory and practice of community organizing were widely influential on the campaign's local efforts.

The full interview is about 45 minutes long, and it's going to take me a little while to get it all up on the web. We covered a lot of ground, ranging from the role of the internet in supporting the campaign's organizing program to the debate over whether online community networks are a form of community organizing. I've excerpted a chunk from the middle here, because it's on the topic that everyone is thinking about: What next for the Obama movement?

Ganz makes three really important points: The first is that we've never had a president enter office with an organizing social movement attached to him, and there's no precedent for thinking about how the participants in that movement have a voice in his presidency. The second is that this movement isn't going away, and the critical question isn't "who's going to get the list" but how will this movement govern itself. The third, which is somewhat of an open secret, is that there is a group of organizers meeting in Chicago right now trying to figure this out, and Ganz believes that their deliberations should be more open. "I think it's important to create the public space for this kind of discussion," he told me. So, with that purpose in mind, here's the interview and a rough transcript below.

When my aunt and uncle-in-law emailed me on November 6th, asking for some advice on what they can do to help Barack Obama "address the great challenges that he and our country face moving forward," I was embarrassingly stumped. Err, there were plans in the works, I knew, to ramp up Americorps and even start some new -corps, like one for inner city teachers. Frankly, though, my relatives aren't looking to devote their lives to Obama. They just wanted to help the country along a bit in their spare time.

Luckily, I remembered something that might just be perfect. During the campaign, Barack Obama had promised to inaugurate just such a part-time volunteerism system, an idea the campaign catchily called "a Craigslist for service."

Covered: Online Right Sees a Chance to Take Root; While the Online Left Considers the President Elect; The Agenda Returns, Somewhat Tamed; Inside a Team Meeting; From World of Warcraft to Washington; Jobs in Internet Defense; and a good deal more.

The Obama campaign, such as it still is, is asking supporters to help figure out where the enormous volunteer network built by the campaign should go next. And the questions they have hinge upon whether a grassroots organization is still viable with its namesake firmly ensconced in the White House.

A new survey hosted on MyBarackObama.com is asking supporters to "help shape this movement" -- possibly a suggestive choice of words when the decision has yet to be made over whether or not to keep the network the campaign built outside the political establishment.