Social Media Insights Blog

Live Blogging Open Government and Innovations Conference

I’m liveblogging today’s Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington DC. Should be pretty interesting. Some key players in Pres. Obama’s open government directive are speaking, including Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO). Also speaking are Tim O’Reilly, credited with coining the term Web 2.0 and David Weinberger, author and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center. I’ve heard David speak before and he was extraordinarily good.

I’m also looking forward to seeing some of D.C.‘s local Gov 2.0 celebs, including Mark Drapeau, Peter Corbett and Maxine Teller.

The conference promises "real-world case studies and insights presented by the government leaders who, themselves, are leveraging social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to define and create a more open and innovative United States government." Stay tuned.

OpenGov is one among several high-profile Government 2.0 events in D.C. Government 2.0 Camp in March was hugely successful; TechWeb and O’Reilly’s Gov 2.0 Summit is coming up in September. Smaller Gov 2.0 meetups seem to pop up every week.

A new direction for this blog

You may wonder what prompts my interest in all things open government. It’s a natural crossover from the corporate world’s evolution from command and control to an unbundled management style, which includes flattened hierarchies, collaboration, more open and two-way communication and increased transparency. Corporate blogging is only one of the many tangible manifestations, of course. The playing out of Government 2.0 is something I’ll be paying a lot more attention to in coming months.

Useful Links

Toward a More Distributed, Collaborative Government: excellent post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger connecting open government to the changing nature of corporations

The complexity of Government 2.0: one of the most thought provoking things I’ve read on what it all means (addresses the problems of transparency and the changing nature of citizen participation)

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