Did you get your Gov 2.0 Summit invite?
About 600 invited guests from the worlds of academia, business, nonprofit, media, technology and government will gather Wednesday and Thursday at the Grand Hyatt in Washington. Organizers say it is the first major meeting with government leaders eager to quickly adapt the online strategies used by President Obama during last year’s campaign to governing and policy.
“We want to make some heroes of the people inside government who are doing innovative things. We want to teach best practices, and we want to learn,” said tech pioneer Tim O’Reilly, the founder of computer book publishing company O’Reilly Media. He is widely credited with coining the term Web 2.0, the period of Internet growth and innovation that spawned online heavyweights Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube, or the government-centric social media site GovLoop.
Gov 2.0 draws its inspiration from Web 2.0 and has been “bubbling along at a certain level for many years,” O’Reilly said. The concept really took off last year after then-candidate Barack Obama effectively exploited online tools and strategy to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and to organize his millions of supporters. Thousands of rank-and-file government managers and employees already using Web 2.0 technologies quickly understood the need to adapt those technologies to the actual work of governing and have embraced the trend. (The Eye tracks dozens of active government employees, contractors and other tech experts who discuss the issue everyday online in several ways. He also met several of them at the recent OGI Conference.)
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