BasicGov / BLOG

September’s Gov 2.0 event in Washington, DC featured a variety of presenters from host Tim O’Reilly to IBM, President Obama’s CTO and CIO, Rockefeller Foundation, Amazon and VMware. This BasicGov blog posts highlights a few of the presentations about technology and innovation.

Closing the Technology Gap by Aneesh Chopra (Federal Office of Science and Technology Policy), Vivek Kundra (Office of Management and Budget). Presentation talks about how government is narrowing the technology gap by aligning research and development with government strategy. They talked about consolidating infrastructure and using cloud computing technologies for example.  View video.

Cloud Changes Everything by Steve Herrod, CTO with VMware. The question and answer session with Steve and Tim O’Reilly highlights cloud computing as a key ingredient with virtualization and how this model allows organization to incrementally change costs and services.  One question Tim asked Steve was “what’s the hardest thing you are working on”. Steve’s answer was about the reality of legacy infrastructures and the need to incrementally add in newer technologies such as cloud computing versus just getting rid of the legacy investments. View video.

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Government’s Toughest Challenges by Andrew McAfee with MIT Sloan School of Management. Andrew is the author of the book Enterprise 2.0 that explains how to adapt the new social tools and platforms to the more demanding needs of the enterprise – including government. Andrew didn’t always answer Tim’s questions but he is passionate about new technology. View video.

Gov 2.0 Expo was held a few weeks ago in Washington, DC. Much has been written summarizing and reflecting on this event that focused on the next generation of government technology and innovation, including cloud computing, social media and open data (just google “Gov2.0 Expo)  to see many articles and blog postings).

This blog post summarizes a few highlights of the Gov2.0 Expo event and links to YouTube videos to watch the presentations.

1. Tim O’Reilly talks about government moving to platform providers and where the marketplace finds and build businesses.

2.  Jack Dangermond with ESRI presented about “Geoenabling Gov2.0”. It is a fascinating presentation that talks about how GIS is evolving and becoming mapping for the masses.  ESRI has launched a new website arcgis.com that is a cloud-based environment to share maps – check it out.  Watch video

3. Kate Lundy with ACT, Australian Government outlined 3 pillars of Gov 2.0: democratizing data (open data format); citizen centric services (easy to use); participatory government (collaboration, consultation.  Watch video

4. Marie Davie with GSA (General Services Administration) talked about how they are changing the $530B contract processes with its “better buy project” to achieve better results for tax payer money.  Watch video