{"id":95621,"date":"2010-05-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-28T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/2010\/05\/28\/lessons-and-highlights-from-the-gov-2-0-expo\/"},"modified":"2024-04-14T04:17:45","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T09:17:45","slug":"lessons-and-highlights-from-the-gov-2-0-expo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/internet\/2010\/05\/28\/lessons-and-highlights-from-the-gov-2-0-expo\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons and Highlights from the Gov 2.0 Expo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aaron Smith and Susannah Fox recently attended the Gov 2.0 Expo, a smorgasbord of policy, technology and citizen engagement put on by the good folks at O’Reilly Media. These are their notes from the conference.<\/p>\n\n

Aaron\u2019s notes:<\/u> <\/p>\n\n

These are my five key takeaways from the conference that government agencies should consider as they think about their online strategies:<\/p>\n\n

Have fun, be passionate, inspire others, don’t be afraid to fail<\/b>\u00a0\u2013The success of any online government effort is directly proportional to the amount of passion you invest, and the extent to which you make government fun and exciting for ordinary citizens. Some of my most memorable moments from the conference included HHS CTO Todd Park nearly flying off the stage as he discussed opening data to improve health outcomes, and Peter Corbett describing his vision of \u201ccivic innovator networks\u201d even though he freely admitted that he had no idea what they might do or how they might develop. If you doubt that fun, passionate people can\u2019t make government exciting, just check out what the city of Bryan, Texas is doing with their drinking water quality reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

[x]<\/p>\n\n\n

Create an environment that encourages serendipitous discovery<\/b> \u2013 By definition, serendipity cannot be manufactured; but you can create an environment that encourages people to consider problems in ways you might never have imagined. For Veteran\u2019s Administration CTO Peter Levin, that means embracing the unpredictability of feedback from users and colleagues (\u201cthe entire value of feedback is that it\u2019s unpredictable\u201d). For the intelligence community, that means working topically instead of organizationally, and asking questions at the broadest level to encourage participation by a wide range of stakeholders. As Anil Dash put it, if you take inspired users and provide them with accessible prompts, they\u2019ll give you answers to questions you never would have thought to ask on your own.<\/p>\n\n

Open data can spark creativity, but data without context can be dangerous<\/b> \u2013 The conference was awash in examples of government agencies opening their data to citizens as a way to spark creativity, develop new applications, crowdsource problems and encourage direct feedback.\u00a0 However, <\/strong>as danah boyd noted in her Thursday keynote, data alone can be dangerous or misleading if we don\u2019t also provide citizens with the tools they need to interpret and contextualize that data.<\/p>\n\n

Examples of awesomeness are all around us<\/b> \u2013 The world is full of cool people doing awesome things, and some of the best \u201cah-ha\u201d moments of the conference took those outside examples and tied them in to a government context. Some of my personal favorites:<\/p>\n\n