The prophet is having second thoughts. In comments that have received remarkably scant coverage on this side of the pond, Clay Shirky, while in London last month promoting the release of Here Comes Everybody in paperback, said the following: “All the rhetoric, including - I'm embarrassed to say - some of mine, has assumed in the past that democratic legitimation is itself enough to regard aggregate public opinion [online] as being clearly binding on the government. I've changed my mind.” This is a momentous admission from someone as influential as Shirky, and timely, as the White House hires former Google exec’s into new positions like the “Director of Citizen Participation,” and considers its web strategy for involving Americans in Federal policy-making. The good people making these decisions at 1600 Pennsylvania have some tough jobs, since the challenges to national level online participation are inherent in both the available web tools, and in the nature of our representative government system.

From the campaign through the transition period participation has been kept to the crowd-sourcing of questions or priorities, which have been, ostensibly, passed on to then candidate (or his staff), and now, President. The crowdsourcing tool, “Moderator” was released by Google last September, and, like the candidate who used it, went from long shot to prime-time in a matter of months. Interestingly, as described by its lead project engineer, Talliver Heath, local governments were the original target market for Moderator. They would use it to elicit and evaluate questions or concerns of local import. In an interview with the tech site, Ars Technica, Heath propounded, “How many city council meetings have you been to? How about school boards? There are always questions you may have about the running of your city, town, state, etc. I believe a public application like Moderator can make civil participation significantly higher in local governments." So from prioritizing policy questions like trash pick-up, and teacher pay, then President-elect Obama, had the tool installed onto his Transition website: Change.gov.

This is a very brief public service announcement. Remember the "Citizen's Briefing Book" that the Obama team launched during the campaign, the one that would pull together the most highly rated ideas on Change.gov and deliver them to President Obama post-inauguration? (At least, that's how I and Google remember it. The archives on Change.gov have fallen into a black hole of transition history.) The project was one of a string of citizen-participation experiments launched during the transition, alongside Open for Questions and Your Seat at the Table. So, has the Citizen's Briefing Book reached the president's desk? Not quite yet, say folks in the White House. Given the pressures of the first several weeks of getting a new presidential administration up and running -- and the launch of WhiteHouse.gov, Recovery.gov and other online projects -- the CBB seems to be somewhere down the list of things to get to.</PSA>

Still hoping for a plum job in the executive branch? Well, WhiteHouse.gov has just unveiled a revamped version of the job application tool that debuted on Change.gov. Only this time, it seems, there's a much better chance of actually matching supply with demand. Applicants are asked to indicate which departments and job functions they're most interested in and suited for. If memory and Google serves, that's much more detail about which jobs applicants are angling for than the Change.gov application process allowed.

Over on his new Plum Line blog, Greg Sargent has reported the news that the White House new media team is now one larger, with Jesse Lee joining the Obama operation as White House Online Programs Director. The somewhat peripatetic Lee is putting his stamp on every corner of Washington, having spent time in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's online shop under the direction of Karina Newton, at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and now in the White House. (Next stop, the Supreme Court!) And during the closing months of the general election, Lee moved over to the Democratic National Committee to help open up the channels between Obama's presidential run and the progressive blogosphere. That effort that earned him a healthy amount of good will with bloggers on the left, a reserve of positive feeling that he might be drawing on in this new job.

But while Lee is known as a blog outreach guy, it seems that that his mission in the White House will be less focused on building bridges in the partisan blogosphere than on turning the White House into a thriving new media organization. During the presidential transition, he was aggressive in experimenting with new ways to create a two-way conversation between the establishment and the citizenry, whether they were inclined to agree with his boss or not. Lee, for example, spearheaded Change.gov's Google Moderator-powered Open for Questions feature -- drawing some fire when the White House punted on answering Bob Fertik's question on appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration.

As part of the White House new media team headed up by Macon Phillips, it seems likely that Lee will be working elbow-to-elbow with incoming Director of Citizen Participation Katie Jacobs Stanton.

• While it might not have been until a few minutes after noon that Barack Obama and John Roberts got that oath of office thing sorted out, the White House New Media team was ready to go on time...
• Footage of Sunday's "We Are One" concert at the Lincoln Memorial has been pulled down from YouTube, with shots of Pete Seeger and Challenger, the bald eagle who wouldn't fly, replaced by "this video is no longer available due to a copyright claim" notices...
• He's keeping the Blackberry, reports someone who ought to know...
• And more.

With just hours to go before the Obama transition finishes and the new government is born, the Technology Innovation and Government Reform group (i.e. TIGR) is featured on the Change.gov website.

Three rising stars of open and collaborative government are featured in the video: Beth Noveck, author of the forthcoming book Wiki Government and longtime pioneer in this arena (she and her partners convinced the US Patent Office to embrace user-generated content with their Peer-to-Patent program); Vivek Kundra, Washington DC's pathbreaking Chief Technology Officer (check out his "Apps for Democracy" contest); and Andrew Mclaughlin, head of global public policy and government affairs for Google.

Joining the growing list of President-elect Barack Obama's experiments in interactivity is the Citizen's Briefing Book...Politico's Ben Smith points us to what looks like a new webisode of "The West Wing," but what turns out to be a new seven-minute video in which key soon-to-be Obama Administration figures make the case for the President-elect's stimulus package...Harvard's Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel overseeing how the Treasury Department's handles the Troubled Asset Relief Program, thinks Henry Paulson et al is guilty of delivering "non-answers."How do we know those juicy details? She said so, in a YouTube video posted to a new and improved cops.senate.gov site...and more.

Putting together a policy briefing book for your boss is one of the toughest jobs handed to a political staffer. There's a strong desire to present him or her with the latest and best intelligence on a particular issue area, without making yourself look like a complete idiot in the process. With the new Citizens' Briefing Book, the Obama transition team has gone all "boy, whitewashing this fence is fun!" with the task -- outsourcing the incoming president's briefing book to, well, us.

Bob Fertik, a longtime liberal activist, drew more than 23,000 votes on Change.gov for his question on investigating the Bush Administration. And yet, the response from the Obama transition last week? Crickets. So Fertik took his cause to George Stephanopoulos...With this second example, we're about to call a trend on the idea of journalists serving as the tenacious bulldogs who get crowd-sourced questions answered...One thing you'll notice about the just-launched Senate Hub and House Hub on YouTube: no ads...and more.

Is there any chance that the incoming Obama Administration will pay much more than passing lip service to the top policy initiatives suggested by the citizen army it mustered to suggest and rank ideas for governance on the super-hyped Change.gov site?

Today on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopolous, the host asked President-Elect Obama about the number one-ranked question from Democratic activist Bob Fertik: "Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor - ideally Patrick Fitzgerald - to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?" Obama's answer was far from definitive - he said he was still "evaluating" the question, but was more inclined to "look forward as opposed to looking backwards." He did suggest that Attorney General designee Eric Holder would have some say in potential prosecutions. [Join us for a panel discussion Monday night].