Time for some editorial housekeeping. In our never-ending quest to cover how technology is changing politics and serve the growing community of activists, technologists, journalists, politicians, government workers, bloggers and plain old citizens who are engaged in making this change happen, we are pleased to announce two new additions to our editorial crew. Dave Witzel and Allison Fine are coming on board Personal Democracy Forum as senior editors who will help expand our coverage on PersonalDemocracy.com of how mass, networked participation in the public arena is affecting all the important arenas outside of electoral campaigns (which we cover obsessively at techPresident).

Let's hope President-elect Barack Obama had a restful Tuesday night, because it's about the only time in the next two and a half months that he won't have someone whispering in his ear with advice on what kind of presidency his should be; Perhaps even more important than the question of who will be the nation's first Chief Technology Officer is the matter of how much real juice he or she will have; As we look forward, let's not forget to look back at how we got to where we are; and more.

After taking a quick initial look at Change.gov, the Obama transition team's new site, we concluded that while it echoes the campaign's talk of open government, the site doesn't have much meat on its bones yet. The Next Right's Jonathan Klingler suggests that the fact that the site has "plenty of feedback forms but not much more" points to the "contradiction of the postmodern left netroots." Let's take a deep breath here; But members of Team Obama aren't the only ones who have been busy. Familiar online conservatives Patrick Ruffini, Erick Erickson, Mindy Finn, Michael Turk; Justin Sayfie, former spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush; and others have launched RebuildTheParty.com; Some in the online left aren't pleased with the decisions President-elect Obama has made or is rumored to possibly be making; and a good deal more.

The New York Times' Michael Falone makes note of a happening that Michael Whitney highlighted on techPresident earlier this week: Change.gov, the Obama-Biden transition site, quietly dropped an "Agenda" section that appeared largely cribbed from campaign materials, replacing it with an oblique 100 words on what's considered important by the incoming Obama-Biden administration; ABC News' Rick Klein has a good overview piece on some of the legal and logistical questions facing the digital arm of Team Obama as it moves into the presidency; If one of the 10 million emails the Obama campaign collected happens to belong to you, you likely recently got a request for cash donations to help the Democratic National Committee "recover the resources it took to win;" and a good helping more.

During the campaign, presidential hopeful Barack Obama put volunteerism front and center -- quite literally, dedicating valuable home page real estate to, for example, calls for help during Hurricane Gustav. The practice helped to define him as a compassionate "brother's keeper" candidate, and President-elect Obama seems intent on taking with him to the White House; when it comes to the first national CTO, are we not actually talking about a Chief Information Officer -- that is, less a nuts-and-bolts technologist-in-chief and more an executive-minded leader with a vision of how government handles its IT duties; and a good deal more.

Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google and Chairman of the Board of the New America Foundation, spoke earlier today about technology, innovation, the economy, energy, and how they are all linked. Schmidt is on the short list for Obama's CTO, and he is a member of President-Elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, so here's an opportunity to learn a little about how he thinks on these topics, through a transcript from his talk.

Fenty and CTO Vivek Kundra created an integrated strategy combining transparent operations, so the public and watchdogs can analyze District operations, plus new tools to help DC workers become more efficient and, the icing on the cake, a wildly-successful program directly involving the public in generating low-cost ideas for services.

The key to all 3 is making available to the public and employees (frequently on a real-time basis!) previously hard-to-access governmental data plus Web 2.0 tools to interpret those numbers.

Building a Better Bully Pulpit; We the People 2.0; We Have the Tools to Finally Pop the White House Bubble; Government is Cool Again; Japan's Online Politics (or Lack Thereof); Ideas for Change, and a Road Map; and a good deal more.

Small Donations, Mid-Sized Donors, and Obama's Cash "Revolution;" "There's Still a Big Hole in Our Game Plan...;" Keeping Up the Democratic Web; Kossacks Take to Congress; Open-Source Obama; and much more.

The next White House Web site should tell us a lot about whether Obama believes what he has said about bringing transparency and accountability to the government.