Overall, I believe the Technology Services’ (NIST) Social Media Day was a success. Dr. Jean-Claude Bradley shared his experience with creating and using Open Notebook Science that will hopefully inspire some of our scientists to see the value in web 2.0 tools to help them with their work. And his work with solubility may become a resource for some of our scientists as well.
Our panel of government guests, Don Burke (CIA), Scott Horvath (USGS), David Hebert (USGS), Emma Antunes (NASA Goddard) and our own Leon Gerskovic and Gail Porter (NIST/PBA) shed light on the web 2.0 tools already bein used successfully at other agencies and some of the challenges we all face in implementing them.
Don Burke expanded on some of the challenges to web 2.0 in his talk about Intellipedia, the wiki used by intelligence agencies. I especially liked how he pointed out the characteristics of government that impede the use of these tools
–everything must go through channels
–committees for further study
–haggle over language
–etc
and that they were included in the WWII Simple Sabotage Field Manual!! (Section 11 for those who want to Google it).
We truly appreciate all our guests coming to our event to share their time and knowledge! To keep the dialog going, I have created a group to discuss the impact of Social Media Day and web 2.0 in general. Please pop by.
Thanks again for having us Jaime. I think it was a good kickoff event. Because there are so many 2.0-ish tools, it would be good to have some future individual presentations focusing on specific types of social media, social networking, etc. ALI Conferences does something similar with their Social Media for Government conferences and there’s many other organizations that have similar “social media” events.
I think the most important thing is that the more events and dialogs on social media that happen within Government, the more we can learn from each other’s experiences and build future collaborations. We all face similar issues and we have the same common goals. If we can keep the lines of communication open then we’ll all benefit. Thanks again for inviting us!
I have to admit that the Social Media for Government class from ALI was what kick-started it for us. We met so many government people employing these technologies successfully. Thanks for coming!
I thought it was a great group of panelists and I certainly learned a lot. NIST needs to explore these new tools and technologies.
I encourage NIST staff interested in web 2.0 tools coming soon to NIST, and the evolving policy on them, to visit the NIST Web 2.0 group administered by Leon Gerskovic. There, web 2.0 issues specific to NIST are raised and addressed. The NIST Social Media Day group is to solicit feedback on that event specifcally, and web 2.0 topics for all government employees.
Thanks for putting this together, Jaime. There were excellent discussions and a lot of how-to and best practices shared. I look forward to seeing more web 2.0 tools used at NIST!
I enjoyed the NIST Social Media Day – very timely. Any chance that some of the talks were recorded? I thought the Intellipedia talk was particularly clever in that regard as his slides were being downloaded on the fly from Intellipedia (which anyone could access) rather than a local Powerpoint (which no one could access).