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.

Early last week, a federal judge ruled in favor of transparency advocates seeking to preserve a slew of poorly stored White House email.

Now, a ruling in a separate case makes this saga a bit murkier.

Bev Godwin, director of USA.gov, is on stage right now until 2:15 eastern taking comments and questions via Twitter about Open For Questions: how did they do, and how can they do it better?

Use Twitter hashtag #askwh and your tweets will be displayed on stage.

In the aftermath of Thursday's Virtual Town Hall, most of us in the tech-politics arena have been pondering one question: How do we improve upon this system to create a better virtual democracy experience? The conversation usually comes back to the problem exemplified by the marijuana questions, which were far and away the most popular questions asked of the president. Some thoughts:

To the tech-politics gurus bemoaning the marijuana questions:

"The marijuana people" did not "game" the system. They didn't "sabotage" it. They didn't get advanced notice. There is no (public) evidence of astroturfing or systems exploitation. They played fair. "Sabotage" is shouting from the back of a room during a Senate testimony. All these people did was show up at the polls. It's the same thing you and I do every other November: they voted. If that's sabotage, then senior citizens are incredibly cunning saboteurs. It's fine to look for better ways of building this system. But stop equating fervent yet fair participation with cheating. I see the marijuana questions as a huge success, in two regards.

Fastest. Government. Information. Request. Turnaround. Evar.

Okay, so that doesn't really work with six words. But I'm impressed. A few weeks ago, the White House announced that its employees' financial disclosure forms were available to anyone who requested them. The process, however, was prohibitive for the casually curious: print out this form, fill it out, mail it to us, and we'll mail the forms back to you. Willingness to disclose information doesn't count if you make it a pain to access.

Where's the Web-based request form, we all shouted. It arrived today. For a government Web site, this is pretty sleak: fill out the form, click submit, and in ten minutes (at least, that was the case with me), you get an email with your PDFs.

As striking as it was that one of the very first acts of Barack Obama's presidency was to call for making the federal government far more transparent, participatory, and collaborative , open government advocates have waited eagerly and, ironically, mostly in the dark for some news on just how this new paradigm would emerge. In some ways, that wait is over.

What could a future White House 2.0 look like? How could millions of people collaborate to help govern the country? Jim Gilliam's web site, White House 2, is one possible answer, but there are many others. This session is going to start off with a presentation from Jim looking at the top challenges that came up when building the application, to see how his lessons learned might be applied on a larger scale. In an email note to his fellow panelists, Jim said he was going to focus on seven areas:

-virtual ballot stuffing