I attended the Gov2.0 online conference this morning and listened to 5 success stories on open government. I was really impressed with the quality of speakers and feel pretty inspired by all of the initiatives around web2.0, social media and the government. Jeff Nigbur, summarized this shift in thinking well during his presentation of the Utah.gov site, “Rather than having the media be our enemy, the social media portal has allowed them to be our friend.”

Here are 3 things we enjoyed from O’Reilly online gov2.0 conference this morning:

1. Unicef’s Merrick Schaeffer talked about the Malawi SMS campaign to fight malnutrition some of his tips were: always work with Open Source, follow agile principals, partner on every project, & develop local capacity. More info about what Unicef is up to can be found at www.unicefinnovation.org

2. Michelle Viotti talked about Nasa’s Be a Martian program around the citizen mapping of Mars. NASA has several crowdsourcing initiatives on the go including one with our friends over at Top Coder - an experimental programming competition to develop algorithms which would help NASA’s flight surgeons make better decisions on what might be included in the medical supplies kit of future long-term human space missions.

3. Melissa Jordan talked about the Bay Area BART and how a small investment led to increased traffic and more fan interactions. bart.gov shares data to let third parties build useful apps for Bart riders. She also taught us that “cupcaking” means constantly kissing and being all over someone in public places in cool-kid speak.

People we now follow on Twitter

I appreciated the comments and tweets from the following people during the conference. I suggest checking out

@unimps -  UNICEF developer focused on mobile phone /SMS development

@GEOpdx -  Geospatial Professional, Community Building Partner, Metro GeoGeek, Government 2.0, Father and Husband

@cheeky_geeky - Co-chair of Gov 2.0 Expo. Voted class pessimist (1993).

@laurelatoreilly -  Editor at O’Reilly Media focusing on various topics, including Microsoft and Gov 2.0. Co-chair of Gov 2.0 Expo 2010.

And @OReillyMedia, of course! By the way, O’Reilly Media tweeted this, “Thank you #gov20 online folks: Get 40% off with the discount code 4cast on print books and 50% off ebooks from oreilly.com” and you should take advantage of the offer. This was a free conference and we hope to see more of the same, but everybody’s gotta make a living, so buy a book.

Tim O’Reilly asked Gov 2.0 Summitters to imagine small govt with big impact

Web 2.0 summits have long been respected for bringing bright minds together to explore what’s working and what’s next in technology. The man behind the summits, Tim O’Reilly, hosted the first Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC Sept 9-10. Two of us from team Chaordix went to check it out. O’Reilly framed the conference around the idea of government as a platform - not just a body that pushes policy at people.

O’Reilly talked about meeting government leaders that surprised him in terms of their intellect, passion and desire to truly do the right thing. I’ve had that same experience. O’Reilly challenged presenters and attendees to think of the move to “transparency in government” not just as enabling watchdogging of government activity but as a new opportunity for government and the private sector to better exchange services and data.

Clay Shirky summed it up saying “the government needs to have a wholesale relationship with people, not retail.” Shirky used the Apps for Democracy community initiative as an example of getting it right. DC’s Office of the CTO offered up raw government data and invited residents and software developers to make something of it with apps to improve city service requests with $50,000 prize money up for grabs. The crowd contributed 47 web, iPhone and Facebook apps in 30 days. Contenders included apps like everyblock.com which let citizens see crime, construction and business license information by street address, the always popular pothole and more fix and monitor app FixMyCityDC, and the ultimate winner an Open 311 app that allows users to submit city service requests via iPhone (buy the app on iTunes) or as a Facebook app.

It was an interesting time to be in DC with Obama’s back to school address and speech on the US Healthcare Bill. It felt like people at the Summit, regardless of political stripes, were striving to be hopeful about possibilities for US govt openness. O’Reilly cast out the challenge ‘Could we get government to be smaller with an impact that’s bigger?” It’s an idea worth taking home to Canada.

The silence on David Rohde’s kidnapping has made a considerable amount of noise on the internet this week. The New York Times asked Wikipedia to keep news of Rohde’s kidnapping off the site. After printing an article explaining why, the rest of the blogosphere chimed in.

Stan Schroder, from Mashable, weighed in with his thoughts, including pointing out this is exactly the opposite of what Wikipedia stands for. He also raises an important question, “who judges what news is dangerous and what’s OK to publish?” (more…)

First, open your kimono

The Xprize incentive 2 innovate conference was this week in New York, with Don Tapscott and Reid Hoffman among the speakers. Companies like Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble as well as well as Unicef, USAID and the US Department of Energy were in attendance – all looking to better understand the future of open innovation and how to apply it as leaders.
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This past Thursday evening, I attended the Web2Summit Planning Dinner in San Francisco. I attended the Web2Summit last year when the topic was Web Meets World and found it inspiring to be surrounded by very smart and generous people. 

The planning dinner was at the Foreign Cinema Café, definitely one of the coolest venues around. Great food and a room packed with about 150 interesting people. 

I thought the event would be more of a collaborative discussion of what Web2Summit should look like this year. Instead, there were three questions for us to answer at our tables. I sat with Greg Kerwin, of TechWeb; Wadooah Wali and Joe Perez, from Demand Media; and Bill Harris, the former CEO of Paypal and Intuit. 

Here were my thoughts on the discussion… 

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