Tag Archives: govloop

What is GovLoop?

Posted on 04. Mar, 2009 by govloop.

2
GovLoop.jpg
Image by Tidewater Muse via Flickr

Hi.  My name is Steve Ressler.  I’m working with Peter, Maxine, Mark, Jeff, and the great crew on Gov 2.0 Barcamp.

I thought I would introduce GovLoop.com, the social network for the government community.

It is one of the tools we will use heavy at Goverment 2.0 Camp and a couple people had questions (in the comments section) about what it was all about.

Basically, I created GovLoop as I saw that government employees were siloed in various communities and never had a great place to connect and share best practices/ideas.  Honestly, I was part of the problem myself.  I’m a federal employee myself (IT guy at DHS) and co-founded Young Government Leaders (a professional organization of over 2,000 young feds).   I loved learning from people passionate about improving government but found myself only talking to people in my silos (mainly feds, mainly Gen Y and some Xers).

I started playing around with groups in LinkedIn and Facebook around government but found the conversations lacking.  So when the company Ning came around providing an easy way to create a niche social network, I hopped on it.  I built upon the platform and launched GovLoop.com in June 2008.

The spirit of GovLoop is much like Government 2.0 Camp.  Anyone is invited as long as you work around government.  We try to provide a safe environment and do not allow hard-core business development and just sleeziness.   We try to brush the haters off and create a place for gov’t innovators to talk about the possibilities and share ideas of how they have cracked the code and implemented change.  I’ve written a couple more blog posts about the background of GovLoop (here, here).

It’s been a great run so far.  Almost 7,000 members ranging from CIOs to public policy students.  City officials from Alaska to DC big-wigs to international folks from UK, NZ, and Australia.  Through the site people have re-connected with former colleagues, gotten tips on impementing new projects, found new jobs, and gotten advice on their thesis.

And there’s plenty more to come.  More people will connect.  Information will be sharing.  And hopefully we can improve government together.

P.S. Check out the Government 2.0 Club on GovLoop

P.S.S. Oh yeah…here’s me doing the GovLoop welcome:

Continue Reading