Dot-Gov'ing Life: Three Little Words

Reposted from GOVERNING' s blog.

Lots of state and local techies are gathering with their federal brethren here in Washington for Government 2.0 Camp, an "unconference" on using technology to make government more accountable and accessible. EPA's Jeffrey Levy, co-chair of the Federal Web Managers Council's social media subgroup, opened the highly unscripted two-day event at the District's Duke Ellington School of the Arts this morning by leading the crowd in a brief chant to set the tone: "Get down, get funky, get loose and groove to the beat."

With that, all several hundred attendees and sponsors spent the next hour and a half proposing breakout sessions and introducing themselves to one by one -- with all of three words to sum up their interests, expertise or reasons for showing up. Here's a telling selection of a few dozen of those brief intros (the words are unedited, but the order below is mine)....

"lots to learn"
"leveraging the tools"
"leveraging each other"
"making data social"
"give data way"
"digitizing dusty archives"
"location based conversation"
"shouldn't cost millions"
"open source adoption"
"let's bash Vista"
"firewall? what firewall?"
"low hanging fruit"
"should be easy"
"making it simple"
"breaking the rules"
"doing it legally"
"changing agency attitudes"
"sick of excuses"
"bosses almost understand"
"no no no"
"I am excited"
"so far behind"
"social media ninja"
"we wear capes"
"we serve you"
"citizens are government"
"need government job"
"up for hire"
"we are hiring"
"journalist, still employed"
"need story ideas"
"Arizona time, tired"
"my thumbs hurt"
"where's the bar"
"nothing to add"
"I'm already inspired"

The discussions over the next two days will be moving just as fast. But since this is the kind of event where plenty of people have written their Twitter @names on their "Hello, My Name Is" stickers, the easiest way to follow what's going on is via the "tweets" posted by attendees. You can monitor those short, rapid-fire messages on Twitter using the #gov20camp tag. The organizers also urged the unconference-goers to post relevant information, blog posts and images on the wiki linked up at the top of this entry.