Tag Archives: #gov20camp

What’s new with Government 2.0 Club

Posted on 21. Apr, 2009 by mixtmedia.

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I hope that you’ve had a good few weeks since Government 2.0 Camp.  It’s good to be back in touch with you to share some ways to continue our Government 2.0 discussions and participation. 

  1. Join the Government 2.0 Club Google Group (if you have not done so already) to continue to participate in discussions about Government 2.0 Club.  Your membership will need to be approved (a measure to reduce spammers).   
  2. Follow @Gov20Camp on Twitter for future communications and event info.
  3. Contribute to the creation of Government 2.0 Camp THE BOOK!  To get out of the Government 2.0 “echo chamber” and help communicate the value of government 2.0 beyond the “goverati” community, Government 2.0 Camp attendee, Nancy Faget, is initiating an effort to write and publish a Government 2.0 Camp book.  To be part of this effort, participate in this thread on our Google Group.
  4. Drink the rest of the Gov20Camp’s sponsorship funds at Government 2.0 Club’s Constructive Happy Hour on Monday, May 11, 2009, at 18th Street Lounge.  We will reconvene the tribe and start to gather around specific topics of interest for future events/initiatives. 
  5. Shape the structure of Government 2.0 Club by participating in the discussion on the Google Group:  an entity?  an unentity? a board? officers?  – discuss.
  6. Party with the DC & Baltimore tech communities at the amazing and always enormous TwinTech4 on May 28, 2009. 
  7. On June 2, 2009, Jeffrey Levy and some other brave EPAers are leading their annual grown-up field trip King’s Dominion to ride the rollercoaster Rebel Yell.  It’s a chance to hang out and have some fun with your fellow “govies” without any work agenda.  Stay tuned to the Government 2.0 Club blog for details. 
  8. Participate in CrisisCamp (June 13-14, 2009), the next exciting unconference about improving technology and practice for humanitarian crisis management and disaster relief. 

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[Room 120] Brainstorm - Bridging the Web 2.0 Generation Gap (Slides)

Posted on 02. Apr, 2009 by akrzmarzick.

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Below is the slide deck that I used to seed the conversation - co-facilitated with Jessie Newburn and Doug Black.

Gov20Camp - Generations Gov20Camp - Generations akrzmarzick Slides from the Government 2.0 Camp in Washington, DC on March 27-28, 2009. An abbreviated version of a longer set of slides that deal with the generations and Web 2.0/Social Media.

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[Auditorium] Running a Federal Blog

Posted on 02. Apr, 2009 by lkthrock.

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[Auditorium] Running a Federal Blog with Jeffrey Levy of EPA

EPA launched a blog called Greenversations on Earthday in 2008.

Had some people from State come to consult on best practices (State’s blog is DipNote)

Focus on Mission, Mission, Mission

Why communicate?

What do they need to know?

What do you need to know?

Wanted to get people jazzed about the environment.

Why blog?

Put a human face on the agency (aka the big black box).
Share personal stories of environmental thinking (e.g. buying a car, gardening).
Share the breadth of government work (dye’s used to color your sheets to pesticides on the food we eat - all regulated by EPA).
Speak in a new way (the way that isn’t a press release or a planned speech).
Supplement, not replace , other channels .

On Comments:
Simple, clear comment policy
- Be civil (don’t attack or use vulgar language)
- Don’t spam
- Stay on topic
Comment policy is linked on the blog. Comment section says “Read the Comment Policy, Leave a Comment”
Comments are usually approved in a day

EPA’s experience: 11 months, 6000 comments, 10 nasty ones (most came in the first month)

Nervous management? Point to other agencies that are doing it.

People seem to respond to the idea that an agency is blogging - a cool lightbulb effect.

Three regular features every week:

Question of the week (Monday)
- Gets the most comments: usually 50 or more (e.g. do you bike to work? do you buy bottled water? cloth vs. disposable diapers, etc.)
- Some have received hundreds of responses
- Advertised to 55,000 news release recipients

Science Wednesday (wants to promote that EPA is, in fact, a science agency)
- Run by research/development office

Bilingual Thursday (
- English/Spanish were in the same post, now split
- Managed by our Hispanic Liason w/three writers

EPA has been astonished with the articulateness and thoughtfulness of comments.

Q: What is response policy?

A: Encourage bloggers to respond, don’t require them to. No complaints to date on what’s happening with EPA’s comments.

Original goal/intention was 3 posts a week. Since onset, it has defied expectations and posts are daily.

Q: Process of launching the blog?

A: Strong requirement that everything reside on EPA.gov, so launched an experiment on an HTML site that couldn’t accept comments.  Then set up a TypePad account (flowoftheriver.gov). Made case for a real blogging platform (requirements). Started using WordPress hosted internally (LAMP server that hosts blog and wiki) and then had the conversation with State Department to understand their best practices. Within EPA, individuals interested in blogging needed to get their managers approval and they had an intro conversation with Jeffrey. Created a blogger guide: www.scribd.com/levyj413.

Q: How do you work through approvals with very scientific posts/comments?

A: Your role is whether it’s vulgar, etc. not the scientific discussion.

Q: Did launching your successful blog make people want their own?

A: Yes, but that has been balanced by commitment or quantity of content realization.  We can give them their own categories pretty easily. Logistically it’s easier for them to do it through Greenversations.

Q: How do you get bloggers?

A: We have a good communicators network. Asked them to nominate people to be bloggers. They went out and found good people for us. We’re always asking people. next step is blogger outreach for guest bloggers. Jeffrey also finds people on Twitter - people passionate and consistent on Twitter.

Gratuitous plug  - www.epa.gov/earthday  - submit photos and videos in various categories. Starting April 1st, will feature content that catches EPA’s eye.

Q: Do you have blogs internally on your Intranet?
A: One or two.

Audience suggestion: Set up a google doc or wiki and Tweet that “we’re looking for guest bloggers.” Very fast as a way of generating a guest blogger list. Example: http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/03/13/calling-all-twitter-users-going-to-necc-2009/

With regards to records management, it’s not FOIA-able because it’s online (so already available). Storage is not an issue because it’s very small as far as data size goes.

We don’t allow people to promote products. Too hard to discern between honest third-party recommendation and company promoting.

We don’t have a blogger core yet, will be open to teleconference, live Twitter chats when that is assembled.
Use Vocus, www.vocus.com, to identify bloggers.

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Creating a Citizen Driven Idea Sourcing Platform & Needs Matching System

Posted on 29. Mar, 2009 by corbett3000.

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The following presentation will provide you with a detailed recap of Peter Corbett’s session during Government 2.0 Camp on “Creating a Citizen Driven Idea Sourcing Platform & Needs Matching System”.


Creating a Citizen Driven Idea Sourcing Platform & Needs Matching System from Gov 2.0 on Vimeo.
DOWNLOAD THE PRESENTATION or flip through here:

Citizen Driven Idea Sourcing and Solutions Matching

Drawing by Diane Cline

Drawing by Diane Cline

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[Room 205] Strategies for Deep Citizen Participation

Posted on 29. Mar, 2009 by macurak.

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Jeff Christensen, Rhiza Labs

Deep Citizen Participation goes beyond 142-character messages – deep civic engagement is when citizens, armed with data, can translate data into action and use it in interacting with elected officials

Three easy steps:
FIRST: Distribute something. Do this first or there’s nothing to talk about.
SECOND: Then, create tools that allow the community to MAKE something. Can be meetings, maps, whitepapers, whatever.
THIRD: Then make it so those tools can allow them to DO something, to get what they’ve created into their lives and into action.

Solutions before problems
We say we want all public data accessible to us immediately – once we have it, what do we do with it? Understanding this requires understanding your audience – not just who consumes data, but who makes it.

Define your problem, then use the audience to determine its solution. (A website with mapping tools? Web service API? Depends on community – there is a laundry list of technologies, determine the audience to figure out which.)

One scientist creates coveted dataset – now what happens with it? Are people going to use it?

To address this, implement built-in feedback loops directly within the tool. Link an artifact to every single time that data has been used by someone else – allow users to comment, leave ratings – build in the conversation between different parts of audience

Rhiza’s examples: Insight.3rc.org; insight.rhizalabs.com; humanservices.net; Southwestern PA After School

If we’re talking about Deep Engagement, we want to inform a group of people to give them a specific action to take – if you give everyone all the information after they digest it they have no time to take a position

So, design tools that enable people to make sense of that data – figure out how users can actually use the data and how it can influence others to take action – can create a cascading effect

Data.octo.dc.gov (DC OCTO)
Apps for Democracy

Can issue-oriented groups mash up the tools and data to communicate across constituencies, make the data available and people who are interested will make things happen?

Gov’t also has a responsibility to provide info in plain language ways that is direct and unbiased to get people who aren’t going to be affected by NGOs or where there is no NGO ecosystem around the topic or where NGO ecosystem is too polarized to be able to use it.

Other problems:
Most people interact with local government over federal government.
Twitter is not deep engagement.
In rural areas no one is building mashups.

If you’re interested in deeper engagement, making data available so people can play with it is great but not enough – and how long will it take until all of gov’t data is available ? – but you have to start making inroads.

Deep engagement is more than just having information available. Gov’t produces so much information and groups are overwhelmed by their content and have no knowledge of correlating activity or how it relates to them

Local governments vs. federal government
Federal has variety of information – business not accessible to average citizen – than you would see on the local level.

All these social networking tools out there, and people can comment on all different things, supposed to be used to engage the public to action – but when simple public meetings aren’t online for them to access, what are they going to use it for?

Current social tools we have access to are just about as effective for this as Web 1.0 “Click to email your congressman your comment” forms – i.e., not effective.

How do you take what’s online and interact in the community with people, with agencies, with whoever your audience is?

Depends on where you’re at in the process – if you’re at gov’t level impact is how open is your data, at advocacy group level how many people are you mobilizing, how are you impacting your legislators?

Citizen-initiated data-driven action
One city neighborhood used public data to prevent a park being clseod for re-routing the tracks – citizen engagement through info gathering and dissemination also engaged legislators, railroad officials.

Bird counts and bucket brigades – citizen-contributed data to large-scale research products

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[Room 120] Survey: Expectations of the Government

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by lkthrock.

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[120] Survey: Expectations of the Government  - USA.gov - Jed@capturagroup.com

Survey Oct. 22 - Jan 5, 2009 on preferences and expectation of social media with regards to accessing government online. 

385 completed survey 78.8% completion rate

People are interested in interacting with govet through social media.

Credibility of gov information is critical for respondents.

Facebook is the preferred social media tool among respondents.

People interested in having conversations with the government.

People use search engines to find information more than any other tool. 

Top ways citizens want to interact:

Emergency alerts
Voting and election information
Way to contact elected officials
Government forms
My rights as a citizen

60% interested in government information on non-government sites (e.g. wikipedia).

People expressed interest in rating government publications and information.

Presentation will be posted to Slide Share.

Tweet stream: http://tinyurl.com/cp34q8

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Ten Recommendations for Successful Government Transparency

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by corbett3000.

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Ten Measures for Transparency Success from Gov 2.0 on Vimeo.

The following video was created at http://government20club.org ’s un-conference “Government 2.0 Camp” and talks about ten factors for effective transparent governance.

Explanation by Andrew Rasiej of

http://www.personaldemocracy.com/

http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/

http://www.personaldemocracy.com/

Live mural graphic by Diane Cline of

http://www.othconsulting.com

Video recorded by Peter Corbett and published with NO RIGHTS RESERVED.

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[Room 120] Brainstorm - Bridging the Web 2.0 Generation Gap

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by lkthrock.

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[Room 120] Brainstorm on Bridging the Web 2.0 Generation Gap with Doug Black @dlblack and @JessieX and @krazykriz

Andrew’s blog (@krazykriz) http://generationshift.blogspot.com - he’ll post his presentations there and they are also below.

@dlblack - Is there a generation Gap with Web 2.0 tools adoption? If so, what do we do about it?

Unique sceanrio in the govt: The Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Xers, Millenials (Gen Y)

@JesseX - Four architypes:

Prophet/Idealist - Dominant
- define inner world of values and culture
- baby Boomer (1943 - 1960)
- Hippies

Nomad/Reactive - Reccesive
- pragmatic check on idealist excesses
- Thirteenth/Gen X (1961 - 1981)
- Juvenile Delinquents

Hero/Civic - Dominant
- rebuild the outer world of technology and institution
- GI, (1901 - 1924)
- Millenial (1982 - 200?)
- Boy Scouts

Artist/Adaptive - recessive
- ameliorate Civic excess and omissions
- Silent (1925 - 1942)
- Homeland (?)

Gov20Camp - Generations and Social Media Gov20Camp - Generations and Social Media akrzmarzick Slides used at the Gov 2.0 Camp in Washington, DC on Saturday, March 28 to show how social media is the bridge among the generations - creating a “Generation C” - creative and collaborative.

Generation C - consumer generating content - some one of any age that is actively using social media.

Stat: There are more boomers on the internet than milenials.

Important to understand online pursuits by generation.

USA Today article Boomers zero in on Social Media.

Boomers aren’t really going to retire - will take second careers to help others.

Gen Xers are right in the middle - those who feel like they didn’t have a voice.

Social media can help bridge the gap to government jobs (millenials)

Social media is not just for kids

Great need for training

Must be sensitive to people of all ages

Boomers need to create the culture now

Recruitment o f new

E-mail: transactional allows for control. Web 2.0 is much more horizontal.

Gen Xers (nomad architype) - hit childhood when children were a hassle. Millenials hit young adulthood in an opposite environment. Boomers are oriented towards turf.

This country needs practical Gen X leaders to serve as leadership.

Assume the monetary system that we know will not exist in short order.

2005 Census

Boomers - 64 million
Generation - 81 million
Millennial - 79 million

Social media bridges the gap because we don’t see ages.

Make it about the millennials, because Gen Xers will need to siphon between the two.

Craft your need in support of the rising generation.

Here’s a link to the Twitter stream from this session: http://tinyurl.com/c3ec23

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[Room 108] Twitter in Crisis Communications with the Air Force

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by lkthrock.

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Case Study: Witness reports crash of Air Force C-17. Within a minute the story was on CNN. Seventeen minutes later, the Air Force countered that it wasn’t true using Twitter.  Fifty-five minutes later CNN retracted story.

Rumor control was phenomenal and empowering. 

With the C-17 scenario, the Air Force had established a precedent for quick response . A couple days there was an F22 crash (which was true), so they had to balance the expectation/precedent for quick response with the time needed to inform families of those who lost their lives. To balance, the Air Force  issued a statement indicating that they were aware of the situation and were insuring and validating information. As the story began to materialize on Facebook, they continued to communicate and ask for patience as they notified next of kin.

Citizen’s for a Free Tibet uses Twitter as the backbone/back channel of crisis communication.

Case Study: Twitter “Vote Report” - developed series of hashtags, 800 numbers, iPhones, androids, to aggregate  data (full case study on Personal Democracy Forum - www.personaldemocracy.com) - software is from get hub.

Monitoring tools: http://search.twitter.com and www.tweetgrid.com

Discussion of concern over using Twitter as the sole channel for crisis communication. Twitter should be one channel. 

SMS is the most reliable channel in a crisis. Frontline SMS mentioned. 

Q: How do you handle the intentional “bad actors?” 

A: Suggested that your community will drown them out. 

Case Study: State Department - There was a rumor started on Twitter that the U.S. was harboring people in Madagascar last week. State decided that because the rumor was started on Twitter, they were going to combat it on Twitter and were successful.

Opinion: Distinguish between micro blogs in a private, contained, closed network and Twitter. Using a public service like Twitter opens up to to bad actors.

Private options:

Laconica - Open Source Twitter clone

IRC

WordPress

Mission is always first, the tool is what helps you accomplish mission.

Lots of debate on  the use  of Twitter at the RNC (specifically with regards to Activist communications). Thought on public versus private networks - private networks often get shut down by local governments in crisis situations.

A first responder commented that sometime the lack of information is critical to control. Not to be secretive about it, but to protect the scene (like an active  shooter situation at a high school) and in order to deliver accurate information. Many times the real-time communication causes mass hysteria and panic. It’s not always about free and open information, sometimes it’s about accurate information.

Continue the discussion at Barcamp.org/CrisisCamp  - Washington, DC - June 13-14

These are the notes for the session http://www.government20club.org/2009/03/room-108-using-twitter-in-crisis-management/

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Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 Semantic Web

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by mollymoran.

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Mills Davis, of Project10X, is leading a session called, “From E-Gov to Connected Governance: What is the Role of Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 Semantic Technologies in an Era of Connected Governance?”.  It’s a full room, and right now we’re introducing ourselves.  Seems there are many technical people here.

Eek - technical difficulties!  Mills will begin without the projector.

Connected governance: we’re moving to a digital age democracy (to participatory, engaged, integrated interactions between gov’t and citizens).  New models and ecosystems for engagement, interaction, decision-making, and service delivery.

The “next internet”: internet of services, things, and 3D interactivity; virtualized infrastructure and everything as a service.  Cloud computing is: scalable, on-demand, click-and-run, pay-by-the-drink resources and services provisioned over the Internet.

One benefit of “pay-by-the-drink” is not having to go through the procurement cycle.

What is Web 3.0?  A web of meanings.  Semantic technologies represent knowledge separately from documents, data, and program code.  

How does this apply to search?  Recovery, discovery, intelligence, question answering, and smart behaviors.

Next generation collaboration?  Combining wikis, semantic content tools, semantic search, ontology-driven applications, and intelligent user interfaces.

Mills gives seven steps that every agency can take (see last slide of presentation).

Good question from the audience about how to deal with inter-disciplinary knowledge: how does the semantic web combine knowledge when we have different understandings of what things mean?  Mills’ answer: we deal with this problem in all discourse (conflict, ambiguity, etc) - it’s part of the knowledge.

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