Government 2.0 #Win?

Last week, we convened a gathering of the Government 2.0 #fail crowd.

The purpose of the meeting was to:

(a) Determine the format of the event,
(b) Identify the target audience, and
(c) Start to craft the topics that would bring forward some of the most pressing issues in government; let alone Government 2.0.

Emma Attunes, Maxine Teller, Steve Lunceford, Justin Franks, Dan Mintz, Steve Guagliardo, and myself were in attendance. Steve Radick, Mark Drapeau, Lewis Shepherd, and Lena Trudeau were not able to make it because they were at conferences, on travel, or some combination of the two.

It was probably one of the most productive meetings I have ever been in. It’s great to work with people who are both smart and equally committed to the cause. One of my action items was to close inform all interested parties on what decisions were made and where we are going from here.

We arrived at decisions in four areas – Audience, Attendance Management, Format, and Title

Target Audience

We are looking for government workers (Federal, state, local, tribal, international, . . .) who:

(a) Are skeptical of the value of social software in government
(b) Have problems that involve bringing together large numbers of people or have sizable datasets that need to be organized, rationalized, and/or shared
(c) Think they have a problem that can be solved with social software, but are not sure
(d) Are responsible for (or have some degree of responsibility for) the problem

As you read this list, may think that you (or someone you know) only fit into one of the criteria above. That’s ok. We want to meet you or your friends even if only one component of the criteria applies.

Semi-Invitational Event

Encouraging people to talk about complex and important issues like risk, agency objectives, and real/imagined obstacles is a central objective of this workshop. The audience and speaker composition involves people who have been involved in multiple aspects of a Government 2.0 implementation or solution. This audience and speaker set would include detractors that often do not wish to spend time attending “another Web 2.0 conference.”

Our approach to getting the people we want in the room is to make this an invitation-focused event. To this end, we will be sending out invitations to a limited number of people. This list may be expanded with an invitation-by request process. Certainly, we will want the invitees to suggest others people they know that might be good speakers or participants at the event.

I recognize that this may seem a little exclusionary. I further recognize that this approach runs counter to our collective ethos of transparency and openness. However, I think that we are demanding a lot from people who are on the fence of adoption. My personal opinion is that we need to give a little to get a little. In this case, we need to make the event more private so that those who are not comfortable sharing publicly today, may share publicly tomorrow.

Format and Progression of the Day

We will be using a one-day “round-robin” format I’ve written about in a previous blog. Each attendee will select a track or interest area. The agenda structure will look something like this:

08:30 – Welcome and Introduction
09:00 – Introductory Speaker
09:30 – Workshop Track 1 (Room A)
Workshop Track 2 (Room B)
Workshop Track 3 (Room C)
11:00 – Lunch
12:30 – Formidable Opponent Debate: Celebrity Guest Appearance by Steven Colbert (ok just kidding – But we will have 2 experts in web security intellectually duke it out)
12:30 – Rotate
12:45 – Workshop Track 1 (Room B)
Workshop Track 2 (Room C)
Workshop Track 3 (Room A)
14:30 – Rotate
14:45 – Workshop Track 1 (Room C)
Workshop Track 2 (Room A)
Workshop Track 3 (Room B)
16:15 – Keynote speaker
17:00 – Close

Finally . . . The Title

After brainstorming a wide cast of titles and themes we settled on:

Mapping Success: Can Government 2.0 Work for You?

We selected this title because it balanced out our desire to state the challenge space in a positive way, but also express the potential for strategic, technical, and implementation #fails.

Next Steps

We have scoped enough of the workshop’s details to proceed with defining the agenda, tracks, and budget. I’ve already received some very excellent ideas through e-mail and from comments on this and related blogs. Thank you soooooo much for those.

We’ll be iterating on those ideas and others over the next two weeks and we’ll get an agenda out to everyone as soon as we can line-up the presenters and speakers. We are shooting for an February date for the workshop.

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you in February!