Key sessions and speakers in this topic include:

• Do You Have What it Takes to Change Government? (Walton Smith, Grant McLaughlin, Booz Allen Hamilton)
• A Conversation with California Secretary of State Debra Bowen
• Why We Need Open Source Electronic Voting Systems (Gregory Miller, Open Source Digital Voting Foundation)
• Making States Work Better (Ory Okolloh, Ushadhi; Clare Lockhart, The Institute for State Effectiveness; Steve Killelea, Institute for Economics and Peace)
• The Civic Commons: Code Sharing Between Cities (Bryan Sivak, Government of the District of Columbia; Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America)
• Creating Passionate Citizens (Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users)
• The Need for Enterprise 2.0 in the Military (Blake Hall, TroopSwap.com)
• Brightscope: Data Fuels the Innovation Economy (Mike Alfred, Brightscope)
• One Step, Many Feet: How Technology is Changing the Relationship Between Citizen and Government (Stacy Donohue, Omidyar Network)
• Building Curriculum Around Real World Problems (Elizabeth Coleman, Bennington College)
• Empowerment and Innovation – A New Generation of Government (Walton Smith, Booz Allen Hamilton)

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We hope you can join us next month in Washington, D.C. Attendance at Gov 2.0 Summit is by invitation only. Reserve your seat today and request an invitation.

• Next Generation Models for Education (Jim Shelton, U.S. Department of Education)
• The Startup Visa: Why We Need More Immigrant Entrepreneurs (Brad Feld, Visa)
• Increasing Innovation by Speeding up SBIR and SBIC (Sean Green, U.S. Small Business Administration)
• The Power of Pull (John Seely Brown, Deloitte Center for the Edge)
• A Smart Grid for Education (Dale Dougherty, Make / O’Reilly Media)
• TED: The First 21st Century University? (June Cohen, TED Conferences)
• Technology and Education (Karen Cator, U.S. Department of Education)

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We hope you can join us next month in Washington, D.C. Attendance at Gov 2.0 Summit is by invitation only. Reserve your seat today and request an invitation.

If there’s one thing we learn from Apple’s iPhone, it’s the power of a platform to spark innovation. Apple revolutionized the smartphone market not just by producing an innovative phone, but by opening up that phone to independent developers. As if by magic, the 15 to 20 applications they designed and released themselves soon became hundreds of thousands, in a textbook demonstration of just what can happen when you harness the power of the marketplace.

So too, government programs can be designed as platforms rather than as fully-specified applications. At Gov 2.0 Summit we’ll be speaking to leaders and innovators in the places where government and technology converge to improve efficiency and delivery of citizen services.

Topic Spotlight: The Power of Platforms

In this topic area of the program, we look at some key areas where government is demonstrating strategic mastery of platform thinking, as well as at some innovative private sector programs that can be adapted for government use. Key sessions and speakers include:

• Government Data and the Invisible Hand (Harlan Yu, Princeton University)
• Why EMR’s Will Transform Healthcare (Jim Traficant, Healthcare Solutions)
• XBRL in the Federal NIEM Framework (Mark Bolgiano, XBRL and Donna Roy, U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security)
• Why the FCC has a Chief Data Officer (Greg Elin, FCC)
  
• Open Government Scorecard (Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation)
• Building a “Holy Cow Machine” for Healthcare (Todd Park, Dept. of Health and Human Services)
• Developers, Developers, Developers (Indu Subaiaya, Health 2.0 and Clay Johnson, InfoVegan.com)
• PayPal: What we Do with Private Data from 200 Million People (Osama Bedier, PayPal)

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We hope you can join us next month in Washington, D.C. Attendance at Gov 2.0 Summit is by invitation only. Reserve your seat today and request an invitation. ]]> http://blog.gov2events.com/2010/08/09/gov-20-summit-spotlight-the-power-of-platforms/feed/ 0 http://blog.gov2events.com/2010/08/09/opening-the-door-to-innovation/ http://blog.gov2events.com/2010/08/09/opening-the-door-to-innovation/#comments Mon, 09 Aug 2010 21:19:30 +0000 Jaimey Walking Bear http://blog.gov2events.com/?p=202 by Tim O’Reilly | @timoreilly |  Originally posted on @radar August 6, 2010

When I organize a conference, I don’t just reach out to interesting speakers. I try to find people who can help to tell a story about what’s important and where the future is going. We’ve been posting speakers for the second annual Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC Sept 7-8, but I realized that I haven’t told the story in one place. I thought I’d try to do that here.

First off, our goal at the Gov 2.0 Summit is to bring together innovators from government and the private sector to highlight technology and ideas that can be applied to the nation’s great challenges. In areas as diverse as education, health care, energy, jobs, and financial reform, there are unique opportunities to rethink how government agencies perform their mission and serve citizens. Social media, cloud computing, web, and mobile technologies — all provide unique new capabilities that government agencies are beginning to harness to achieve demonstrably better results at lower cost.

Our focus this year is on opening the doors to innovation – learning about the latest technology and its application, and breaking down the barriers to its adoption.

Here are some of the themes we’re exploring:

1. The Power of Platforms

If there’s one thing we learn from Apple’s iPhone, it’s the power of a platform to spark innovation. Apple revolutionized the smartphone market not just by producing an innovative phone, but by opening up that phone to independent developers. As if by magic, the 15 to 20 applications they designed and released themselves soon became hundreds of thousands, in a textbook demonstration of just what can happen when you harness the power of the marketplace.

So too, government programs can be designed as platforms rather than as fully-specified applications. In this section of the program, we look at some key areas where government is demonstrating strategic mastery of platform thinking, as well as at some innovative private sector programs that can be adapted for government use.

We’ll hear from speakers including:

• Harlan Yu of Princeton, one of the authors of the paper Government Data and the Invisible Hand, which outlines the rationale for opening up government data in machine-readable form.
• Jim Traficant, who is not only the vice president in charge of the Healthcare Solutions group at Harris Corp, but has intensely personal reasons to believe in the importance of electronic medical records: they saved his life. Twice. He’ll tell us why electronic medical records can and must transform our health care system.
• XBRL US CEO Mark Bolgiano and the Department of Homeland Security’s Executive Director for Information Sharing (and NIEM Executive Director) Donna Roy, who will share early success stories in using XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) and NIEM (National Information Exchange Model), and suggest how they can be to increase transparency and visibility into “big data” in the private and public sectors, and where they intersect. I’m particularly excited by Mark’s thoughts on how to track programs that are funded by the Federal government but actually administered by states or even local jurisdictions. As in healthcare, electronic reporting creates the possibility of feedback loops analogous to those that we’ve long enjoyed in creating web applications that get smarter the more people use them.
• Todd Park, CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services, who has a vision of how health care data can be used to create a “holy cow machine” that will let us reduce health care costs and improve health outcomes in the same way that Walmart improves its inventory efficiency or Google improves ad targeting. He’ll talk about how aggregate data about health outcomes is unleashing a torrent of innovation, as we move from paying for volume of care to paying for the value of care in improving actual health outcomes.
• Clay Johnson, former head of Sunlight Labs, and Indu Subaiya of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, who will address the question of how government open data initiatives can best reach out to developers. Developers are the heart and soul of every platform. You can’t just “build it and they will come.” You have to take practical steps towards developer evangelism.

I’ll talk about some of the speakers in the other parts of the program next week, but as a teaser, let me highlight some of the other themes we’re exploring.

2. Innovation

Real innovation doesn’t just mean tinkering around the edges. It means remembering your goals, and finding a new way to get there. In this series of sessions, we’ll explore some of the most exciting new sources of innovation, and how they can be harnessed by government. We’ll also take a close look at education, one of the foundations of our innovation economy, bringing some fresh voices to the innovation debate.

3. Improving Government Effectiveness

It isn’t enough to be innovative. Government agencies also need to be effective. In this series of sessions, we’ll explore topics such as cost savings, efficiency, and customer service.

4. Empowering Citizens

“We the people…”, the opening of the US Constitution, is a reminder that our government is nothing other than an expression of the collective will of the citizens. No divine right of kings, no entitled nobles, just we, the people. And government is a mechanism by which we express our will. A mechanism that is being turbocharged by the participatory technologies of the web, social media, and mobile phones. We’ll explore how to rethink the role of government in the age of electronic participation.

5. Identity, Privacy, and Informed Consent in the Age of the Internet

Many of today’s most powerful technologies depend on trust – trust that when a consumer or citizen provides information, either explicitly or implicitly, to a web or mobile application, that information won’t be misused. Trust is essential, because in order to receive the benefits of social, mobile, and real-time applications, consumers must provide information that has the potential to be misused – their location, their friends, what they are doing, what they are buying, what they are saying, what medications they are taking, how much energy their homes and businesses are using, and much more. The answer is not to treat this information as a kind of toxic asset, and build Maginot lines to protect it, but to build policy frameworks around acceptable use, and penalties for misuse. We’ll explore where the technology is leading us and what those policy frameworks might be.

I’m really excited to have such an amazing blend of industry AND Federal heavyweights on the program and in the audience because it gives us an opportunity to explore what the latest technology means for the crafting of future policy and strategy. We’ve got CTOs and other key executives from major technology companies, including Cisco, VMWare, PayPal, IBM, and Facebook, and their opposite numbers at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. We’ve also got innovative small companies, educators, and deep thinkers about the future, all with a shared goal of making things work better.

I’ll share more detail on some of the other program themes and speakers over the next few weeks.

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Attendance at Gov 2.0 Summit is by invitation only. Reserve your seat today and request an invitation.

Gov 2.0 Summit 2010 will be no less important an event. To help you get a feel for what to expect, we give you these great moments from 2009:

And this excellent keynote from Health and Human Services CTO, Todd Park:

Attendance at Gov 2.0 Summit is by invitation only. Reserve your seat today and request an invitation.

Our friends at InformationWeek Analytics are conducting a survey to determine what federal government IT organizations are doing to tackle diverse challenges and make tough decisions. The results of this survey will appear in an upcoming issue of InformationWeek as well as an in-depth report.

This survey is for those working within the federal government (including contractors /integrators).

This survey will take under 10 minutes to complete. If you complete the survey by tomorrow, July 7th, you will be eligible to enter a drawing to receive one Apple 32GB iPod touch valued at $299 from TechWeb. Your responses will remain confidential and will only be reported in aggregate.

Click here to take the survey.

• Karen Cator – Director of the Office of Education Technology, U.S. Department of Education
• June Cohen – Executive Producer. TED.com: TED Conferences
• Elizabeth Coleman – President, Bennington College
• Dale Dougherty – Editor and Publisher, MAKE / O’Reilly Media
• Nicholas Gruen – Chairman, Gov 2.0 Taskforce (Australia)
• David Hale – Project Manager, Pillbox: National Institutes of Health
• Steve Herrod – CTO and Senior VP of R&D, VMware
• Steve Killelea – Chairman and Founder, Institute for Economics and Peace
• Clare Lockhart – Co-founder and Director, Institute for State Effectiveness
• Carl Malamud – President, Public.Resource.org
• Gregory Miller – Executive Director, Open Source Digital Voting Foundation
• Tim O’Reilly – Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media
• Todd Park – CTO, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services
• John Seely Brown – Co-Chairman, Deloitte Center for the Edge
• Jim Shelton – Assistant Deputy Secretary, Innovation and Improvement: U.S. Department of Education
• Kathy Sierra – Author: Creating Passionate Users
• Bryan Sivak – CTO, Government of the District of Columbia
• Jim Traficant – VP & Senior Executive Account Mgr: Healthcare Solutions, Government
• Padmasree Warrior – CTO, Cisco Systems, Inc.
• Harlan Yu – Co-author: Government Data and the Invisible Hand

Gov 2.0 Summit is the place to join other leaders from federal, state, and local government along with individual and corporate entrepreneurs, citizens, not-for-profits, and educators, to articulate and explore the idea of Government as a Platform. Registration is by invitation only. Reserve your seat today and request an invitation.

Chris Kemp, NASA’s CTO of Information Technology, speaks with O’Reilly Media’s Alex Howard about Nebula, open standards, innovation and more at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, D.C.

Can state governments deliver more services with constrained budgets? How can social media and collaborative software be used to engage citizens and lead to better policy decisions or investments? Can open government lead to better e-government? In this interview, Alex Howard, Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, interview Carolyn Lawson about precisely these issues. Lawson is the Deputy Director, Technology Services Governance Division, Director of the eServices Office of the state of California.

You can read more about how California is delivering e-services over the Internet in a previous post on this blog.

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Jaimey Walking Bear is on the Marketing team for Gov 2.0 Expo. He can be reached @gov2events or @jaimeywb

Although we like to assign geographic location to ideas and communities, technology and government are not exclusive to Silicon Valley, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, or Washington, D.C. Hosting the inaugural Gov 2.0 Expo in the nation’s capitol will bring together citizens, technology companies and governments from around the United States and around the globe.

Visitors to the District of Columbia are often impressed and inspired by the monuments of history and government institutions that surrounding the National Mall. These monuments celebrate the people who not only founded America but also provided the constitutional framework that allowed public service, leadership and inspiration to flourish for generations to come. As the United States continues to grow as a nation, encourage innovation, and strive for a better government, we might do well to reflect upon the words forever emblazoned on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial by our third president.

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

The timelessness of Thomas Jefferson’s thinking lends weight to why the idea of “government 2.0” is so important now. These early days of 21st century are an optimal time to embrace and explore more than just technology. In 2010, collaborative techology can also enable the enrichment of people and improvement of processes inside of government to deliver more efficient services to all citizens. The Open Government Directive is leading the federal government to become more transparent, participatory and collaborative. As citizens rapidly adopt new technologies and ways of living, working, they are participating in civic life online in unprecedented numbers. “institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.” Although this conference focus on technology, the tools are only one of the essential elements in this discussion. If government is to offer a platform that’s allows citizens to build better services and policies though open data, it’s crucial to understand how people are changing and successfully applying technology to solving the grand challenges of our times.

Gov 2.0 Expo will provide a springboard for participating in this continual evolution by focusing on technologies that enrich and advance the mission of government at the federal, state and local level. We are here to celebrate the people and projects that sustain and improve the institutions here in Washington and in other seats of government around the world. What we build upon here will add to the continual advancement of a more participatory, transparent, and collaborative government on every street.

Thank you for being part of the Gov 2.0 Expo,

Laurel Ruma (@laurelatoreilly) and Mark Drapeau (@cheeky_geeky
Program Co-Chairs