Government 2.0 Camp Reprise

On day one we started off with your name, who are you with, and three words that described you or the name of a session you would like to propose. My three words: Geek Girl Supreme as recently dubbed by Adriel Hampton on the Government 2.0 show on Blog Talk Radio.

I spent most of the two days working as the Blog Coordinator for the event. And for the sessions I did attend, I tried to keep to some light housekeeping in which to make sure the presenter instructions where followed and the sponsors were thanked. I did manage to find time to actually moderate a session on Citizen 2.0. I didn’t want to be the focus of the session to be on me, since there were a lot of great minds in attendance. I have touched on Citizen 2.0 in the past and from the session at Government 2.0 camp there seems to be many ideas of what an individual defines for this moniker.

Now there have been a multitude of blog posts already by my colleagues and friends and new faces in the past couple weeks. I took my time to post this reprise because I wanted to make sure it didn’t get lost in the fold. As this is not so much about the content, but about the event itself, the best practices and lessons learned going forward.

I think I would break up my review of the event in some pros and cons:

Pros

• So many sponsors – it made the event free for attending, provided food, provided the venue
• Parking – I got great spots both days. The first day I parked in a two-hour zone and did not get a ticket (musta been luck – because every time I am in Old Town Alexandria, I get a ticket)
• So many attendees – so much interest. Really gives me the fire in my belly that its not just those of us in the Beltway that want to change our aging institutions.
• Kick off of the Government 2.0 club – for those of you that bravely stayed until the long at last end, on day two we crowdsourced our charter.
• Networking – I finally got to meet Chris Dorobek and Jeffrey Levy in person because of this event. We all thought bringing us together in the same room would never happen and be a sure sign of the end of the world.
• Knowledge Capture – while we didn’t get it all, this was the first unconference that I had seen that was completely transparent and information was going up as it happened, rather than later in the night. For 48 hours and weeks to follow, information is still being generated about sessions and the event itself.

Cons

• Credit to the unsung volunteers – I am not discounting anything Mark, Maxine, Jeffrey, and Peter have done to get this effort underway. But there was a group of us over a dozen that made all the logistics happen and helped the event run smoothly. Everyone had a role and if I new everyone’s name I would list them. They made sure there was water, wifi, pizza, candy, the works. If you thought something was nice about the amenities of Gov20Camp, it was because of one of them. In so many of the post-publications I had not seen a mention of a hat-tip to those volunteers. So here’s to you (imagine me singing the bud light real American hero tribute to you)
• Unfocused – Government 2.0 is a big big subject as so many of us define it so many different ways.
• Large Participation – so many people made it hard to effectively network
• Too many sessions – with what seemed to be over 100 sessions over the two days there was so much to choose to participate it was just as bad as going to a conference like SxSW Interactive. The schedule was overpacked. It was also repetitive. We could have used the first hour sessions to really modify the schedule even more and narrow down the rooms. Some topics repeated, which is good and bad. I did like that on day two, we learned from day 1 and made the gallery an “open room” for ad hoc discussions. This is something I initiated at WIReICES last fall. Having an open room during our conference. I admit I got the idea from the open sessions I had seen at Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco in 2008.
• Knowledge capture – even with prior planning from lessons learned at other events, the moderators and presenters in some rooms failed to heed instructions on the yellow note we gave to them. I know this was an unconference, but some protocol does work. We had a wiki, a blog, google forums. There was just so much information spread throughout that was not interconnected. I have been trying in the weeks since to help bridge that gap.
• Too Much Web 2.0 and not enough Enterprise 2.0 – I took a break from my normal push of Enterprise 2.0 discussions except for the Wikis in room 205. I know I know my stuff when it comes to wikis and the Enterprise, so I tried to be more of a listener. I did end up participating more in that session and I am glad I did. Great connections. But again, I purposefully took a step back from talking about the Enterprise, because I didn’t want to come off as a vendor or someone selling a solution. However, I kinda regret not pushing for that in the end because I saw much about external facing solutions and not enough internal solutions for communication, collaboration, and transparency. This drives me even more to have the specific Enterprise 2.0 Conference for Government this fall as I have previously talked about. I am also looking forward to the Government 2.0 summit in September.

I have been both a participant and an organizer of BarCamps and Unconferences before. This way by far the biggest one I had been too, but IMO wasn’t really the first unGovernment unconference. I have to believe outside of the ones I had organized and participated with some of my Government customers (on a smaller scale), that some where else, some other Government organization had tried something like this.

I think we could definitely do this event again. It should be yearly and not just DC centric. Although this area is the Mecca for Government. I would be interesting in knowing if anyone would want to see this be hosted in other cities. So if we do it again next year in March, who would be the host city? What would you like to see different?

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