Gov 2.0 Camp a Turning Point for Open Government

Posted by: Scott Johnson, Co-Founder and Principal Mar 30, 2009 0 Comments

You could practically hear the barriers starting to crumble on Friday and Saturday as 500 social media visionaries and practitioners convened at DC’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts for the Gov 2.0 barcamp.

Jack Bienko, the highly-caffeinated Marlboro man of the SBA said it best when he quipped, “this is like the Woodstock of government transparency. The folks that really get it are now in power.”

He had this epiphany as we watched White House new media luminaries, Bev Godwin and Macon Phillips discuss the Obama administration’s commitment to using new media technologies to increase government accountability and citizen engagement.

Throughout the two-day event that included over 100 sessions, the overriding theme was clear: If you are in government and are still creating obstacles to internal or external openness, transparency, or full engagement, we will find a way around you. The walls are coming down.

Even at the event itself the walls were coming down as participants in each session Tweeted each session’s main points. As we found out about sessions that sounded better than those we were in, we simply walked out of one and into another.

If you have never attended a barcamp unconference before you would have been in for a shock. It is an exercise in orchestrated chaos. Organizers Peter Corbett, Maxine Teller, Mark Drapeau and Jeff Levy showed up with a couple of thousand bagels, 200 gallons of coffee, stacks of paper, a box of Sharpies and little else. As the hundreds of attendees began streaming in, what was conspicuously missing was an agenda for the event itself—that’s because there was none! At a barcamp, the attendees shape the agenda themselves at an opening session where each attendee shouts out their name and affiliation, and if they wish, the name of a session they want to facilitate.

I think Personal Democracy Forum’s Matthew Burton sums up the general sentiment of the two day event when he says, “For me, the takeaway from this weekend is that the government is now in the company of those that can help them, and geeks have met some customers with problems worth solving.” Amen!

Enjoy this post?

Subscribe to the feed

-->

Scott Johnson

Co-Founder and Principal

• Most Recent
• Topics

View all previous posts