Category Archives: Conference

Post PS Engage Activities

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 A huge thank you to the delegates, sponsors and volunteers that make #PSE2011 such a success. We are getting asked when 2012 is going to happen, and hearing stories of enthusiastic teams returning to work full of the spirit of renewal, so I guess it was a success.The big question now is do we do it again? And if we do, what do we do differently?

To answer those questions we are going to need your help. Look for an invitation to join a PS Engage collective intelligence site hosted by Chaordix , Intersol and Rowanwood,  Assuming we can get it together in our spare time, we will be looking to get your opinion on the 2011 event as well as ideas for a 2012 event. Who knows? We might even extend the conversation around the Learning Circle Issues or the Tapestries of ideas that Jennifer created for us.  Or perhaps we can work on the Virtual Government Network concept if there is enough interest.  Maybe Delta Partners will get involved with a little of their awesome thought leadership. Whatever it is, it will be your opportunity to influence the future of PS Engage.

In the coming weeks and months we will be releasing material generated by the conference on the PS Leader Site. It is our intention to make the video, presentations, photographs and tapestries available. There is work  to make that happen and everyone at the moment there are clients to satisfy, so it may take a while.

PS Engage never would have happened without the fabulous cadre of volunteers that materialized. You know you are appreciated.

Speaking of volunteers, right now, web-savy volunteers are welcome to apply for positions helping out with the current activities. This includes things like posting material to the PS Leader blog and perhaps editing photos and preparing presentations for publication, creating descriptive posts to go with each item, text and image.

Eventually if we decide to do another event, we will be looking for folks ready to make a slightly larger commitment and join the planning committee. If you are interested in any of that, please let us know by joining the LinkedIn group.
Thanks again to everyone involved. You make it happen.
Thom

Q&A with Ina Parvanova

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This is the third installment in our series of highlighting PSEngage Speakers.

Ina Parvanova Public Affairs Director, at Mayo Clinic has extensive experience working in a fast paced environment. Ina started her career as a reporter, working for Reuters and Canadian Press. In 1998, Ina joined the Public Service and spent a number of years at Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada before joining the Privy Council Office where she was responsible for the international communications files.

In 2008, Mayo Clinic recruited Ina to establish its Research Communications function to support $540 million in research operations at Mayo Clinic. Ina is currently part of two leadership teams. One is a reflection of Mayo’s new strategy to make a global impact in healthcare called Global Bridges – a Healthcare Alliance for Tobacco Dependence Treatment. The other is statewide effort called Decade of Discovery: A Minnesota Partnership to Defeat Diabetes.

At this year’s event, Ina will be speaking on innovation at the Mayo Clinic and how Mayo is adapting to current challenges while staying true to its nearly 150-year old mission and values.

We asked Ina about innovation, adaptation and managing when you aren’t a subject matter expert. Here are Ina’s very thoughtful replies.

1. You’ve had a varied career that has covered a wide area of subject matter. What do you do to be confident about the decisions you make, even though you may not be the subject-matter expert?

In Communications, you’re as good as your knowledge and understanding of the audience. If you know your audience, you know what questions to ask the subject matter experts (because you know what questions your audience would ask) and you know how to deliver the message to your audience so it has the desired effect.

I think that’s where my varied career and diverse background come in – as a journalist, I’ve been fortunate to talk to people from all walks of life, to understand how they think. Having lived on two continents/three countries broadened that experience and allowed me to relate to allophones, to immigrants, to single parents – a multitude of audiences. I’ve always been a student of human nature and that’s what gives me confidence as a communicator – along with the belief that with an open mind and empathy one can identify with any audience and then build a bridge between them and the subject matter experts.

2. How much of the innovative process is creative and how much is about defining the business case and making the concept tangible?

You are right that you cannot have one without the other. But in what proportion? I think that depends on the stage you’re in. In the beginning, an idea is just that – an idea, a spark, and the process of implementation seems to take a backseat. But as you go forward, the ratio changes, and no matter how brilliant the idea, it needs a solid rationale and institutional buy-in in order to get implemented. And the more innovative the idea, the more creative you need to be in defining the business case and making the concept tangible.

3. What are the qualities you look for in people to work on innovative files?

Natural curiosity, open mind and tenacity.

4. Resilience is often identified as a key element in one’s ability to accept change. How does one develop resiliency?

Interesting question!

You know, to the extent that experience can teach us, the more changes you’ve lived through, the more resilient you should be. Think of someone who has lived their entire life in their hometown, worked at the same workplace for over 30 years (yes, there are still people like that) – if they are forced to go through a significant change, it can be a traumatizing experience.

On the other hand, if change has been a regular part of your life, you know what to expect and you know you will survive and will be fine.

But experience is only part of the answer, because many would argue that there is a limit to how many changes one can go through without burning out. So can we develop resiliency to prevent that? Is it like a muscle, that as long as you exercise it, it will serve you?

I think so. Especially because it is already in us. We are born with it, it’s a basic survival skill. Kids are resilient. The question is how to maintain it and not lose it after life has dealt us a few blows.

As we go through various experiences – especially hardship – some of us lose that resiliency and start dreading change. Perhaps the key to accepting change in stride is having a healthy self-esteem. As children, we all start with a healthy self-esteem. Along the way, some of us become more fragile, more insecure, and end up finding solace in the past – the old way of doing things, the previous workplace or the last relationship. But if you have a healthy self-esteem, you know who you are, and the past – while it may have enriched you – does not define you. Even when you mourn something that is no longer there, you know that you will survive and the new circumstances are simply a new opportunity. In that sense, to me, self-esteem is the source of our resiliency, the magic ingredient to accepting change.

See Ina live and in person at PS Engage, November 22, 2011 in Ottawa.

Questions and Answers with @Thumbtackhead

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This is the second in a series of guest posts by @IM4Ward, on behalf of the PS Engage planning committee.

The PSEngage conference is happening November 22, 2011 and the line-up of speakers is inspiring.  To give more insight to the knowledge and interests of the speakers we sent them each a set of questions tailored to their individual experience.  We will be posting the questions and their responses over the next few weeks, so please keep checking back regularly.

Today’s interview is with @Thumbtackhead, John Weigelt,  National Technology Officer at Microsoft Canada.

John’s participation at PS Engage 2011 will be to share examples of government 2.0 activities across jurisdictions.   If you’ve read John’s bio and his blog, http://www.thumbtackhead.ca/, you’ll realize quite quickly that John has an interesting approach to innovation.  Innovation for John is not a wishy-washy process, but rather something that requires rigour and structure to bring out, explore and ultimately exploit creative ideas to achieve the objectives.  Perhaps this comes from John’s military training.  Read the questions and answers below to come to your own conclusions.  

Q1: Your biographic information says you went to military college – Do you think military training influenced your approach to innovation? If so, how?

A1:  I think that my military training influenced my approach to innovation in several ways.  The best way to consider this is to try to imagine the crosswalks between a military operation and a business process.  For both it is critically important that leaders select and maintain the objective.  By describing their objectives leaders can empower entire communities to innovate to help attain the broader goal.  Military training also helps people think about broad and often innovative approaches to solving a complex challenge.  When encountering a tough adversary, a military leader will consider a wide variety of factors, probabilities and build out several scenarios to test an idea.  Rarely will the effective leader choose a single approach to victory.  Full campaigns will include a main action, perhaps several auxiliary actions, feints, special forces etc.  All must be performed with creativity and innovation, lest the adversary gain the upper hand by being able to predict what may happen.  With innovation, it’s important to look broadly across the problem space to seek out new approaches.  Finally, one last thing that it helped me appreciate is the concept of Exercising Empowerment. Sometimes people in very structured organizations like the military, government or large businesses project a sense that there is little room for independent thinking.  I would suggest that it is actually the opposite and that great ideas are always welcomed.  Not that I would encourage everyone in uniform to pick their own pace when on parade, but there are opportunities to innovate within all structures.

Q2: Technology is driving a lot of innovation and change – What can business leaders do to understand the innovation options presented by technology without becoming a technologist.  What are the types of questions business leaders should be asking?

A2: I think that the business leaders need to consider the outcomes from innovation.  The Boston Consulting Group identifies 5 outcomes from innovation:

      • New to world products or markets
      • Expanding your current customer base
      • Reaching entirely new types of customers
      • Incremental changes to existing products
      • Improving efficiency in existing processes.

By focusing on the outcome, the business leader can abstract out the technology and explore the business outcome that will be driven.  Rarely does innovation simply pop arbitrarily into mind, rather, it is usually as a result of hard work on a particular problem carefully extended through a connection with other ideas or experimentation.  Business leaders should therefore focus on their area of expertise and look to harness adjacent innovation by extending their expertise through the careful application of technology.

Q3:  In your blog post, “Hearsay and other crimes against innovation” you emphasize the importance of fact checking and conducting the necessary research to substantiate the proposal.  Can you give some ideas or examples of how these elements can be built into a business case?

A3: Evidence based decision making is fundamental to managing the risks and opportunities presented by any change to the status quo.  To make good decisions, it is essential that there be a thorough understanding of the evidence being used.  There are any number of ways that statistics can be presented in a biased manner (as is well described in “how to lie with statistics” .In one case I saw an internet study where a very small percentage of a small global sample size answered (with a checkbox) that they had lost between $10 and $100 due to a particular type of fraud.  The study went on with some gratuitous extrapolation by multiplying the $100 Maximum against the entire Canadian population to arrive upon a multi-billion dollar impact for this fraud.  This created an alarming number, 4X any number previously proposed.  Given the margins for error, the factor of 10 difference in the potential losses all multiplied 1000s of times created a completely fictional statistic that eventually made headlines.  Imagine what would happen if the government program leader took that number at face value to look to resolve what was reported as a huge problem.  Even worse that the potential loss of funds, the misdirection of resources or efforts due to mis-prioritization has the potential to torpedo not only service delivery programs but sink entire businesses.

Q4: The Fed. Government is pushing improvements in the management of information through policies and directives – resulting in the focus of efforts being on compliance, rather than on opportunity.  What can you say about the relationship between information management and opportunity?

A4: Information is the lifeblood of government/ businesses and has been called the cornerstone of democracy.  It is therefore paramount that information be properly managed throughout its lifecycle.  Policies, directives, standards, guidelines and recommendations all play a role in providing advice and guidance for consistency across the organization.  While compliance is a necessary part of business and government routine, I’ve always had a love hate relationship with the term and how some people approach it.  In the worst cases, compliance is a sort of lowest hurdle to get over to be able to operate.  Like the runner in the Olympic race, some organizations will look to barely clear their compliance requirements, or just hit them so that they don’t get into trouble with their oversight body.  It has been shown that even though an organization meets its compliance checklist, it can completely fail in the meeting the objective of the compliance requirement in the first place. I believe that organizations should look broader than simple compliance to fully capitalize on the opportunities that can be garnered by going beyond the checklist.

Be sure to see John and other smart people at PS Engage, November 22, 2011.

GTEC thoughts and a pitch for PS Engage

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Last week I was fortunate to attend the GTEC conference at the  new congress centre in Ottawa. There was lots of talk about changes to the Federal Public Service in Canada. Some of the things that stuck with me are that:
  • The new Shared Services Canada is focused on the consolidation of IT Infrastructure, but it is part of a larger effort to move to shared internal services. Departments are to become leaner, more collaborative, and focused on their mandate.
  • Canada has joined the Open Government Partnership which means it is now accountable to other nations with the requirement to produce an annual report. Wouldn’t it be neat if they somehow engaged the crowd to produce that report?
  • Tony Clement announced that the Cabinet would replace briefing binders with secure wireless tablets. Let’s hope that is the beginning of tablets for all!
  • Later that day I ran into the Occupy Ottawa folks marching down Sparks street, reminding me there is a global movement afoot.

Any way you look at it, whatever your role in government, big change is on the horizon.

PS Engage is a one day learning and networking event that focuses on helping you make the most of that change. By bringing new and relevant ideas for public service modernization to Ottawa we hope to stimulate new thinking that doesn’t just “make do” in times of fiscal restraint, but that seizes the opportunity it presents to invent a new, more sustainable status quo.

I have written about what makes PS Engage different  on my blog. People I talk to seem to agree that there is an awesome speaker line up and a jam packed program of relevant topics and interactive events.

Speakers include:

  • The Honourable Tony Clement,  President of Treasury Board and Minister for the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario
  • Alan Silberberg, Founder of Silberberg Innovations and Gov20LA
  • Ken Cochrane, Partner, IT Advisory Services – KPMG Canada and former CIO Government of Canada and ADM for GCPEDIA
  • Lovisa Williams, Deputy Director, U.S. Department of State
  • Denise Amyot, CEO, Canadian Science and Technology Museums
  • Ina Parvanova, Public Affairs Director, Mayo Clinic
  • Andy Jankowski, Global Director, Intranet Benchmarking Forum
  • Steve Ressler, Founder GovLoop.com

For the complete list please visit the web site at www.psengage.org.

One of the most common complaints I hear from government executives is that they don’t have enough time to think. Book some time today for you and your team to connect and learn by registering for PS Engage. The cost is modest at $499.00 for a full day and early evening, with group discounts you can send five people for less than $2000.00.

There are less than 4 weeks until the event and seating is limited, register at www.psengage.org.

I hope to see you on November 22, 2011.

Thom

PS Engage – Q&A with Andy Jankowski

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This is the first in a series of guest posts by @IM4Ward, on behalf of the PS Engage planning committee.

The PSEngage conference is happening November 22, 2011 and the line-up of speakers is great!  To give more insight to the knowledge and interests of the speakers we sent them each a set of questions tailored to their individual experience.  We will be posting the questions and their responses over the next few weeks, so please keep checking back regularly.

Today’s interview is with @AndyJankowski Global Director, Intranet Benchmarking Forum

Andy will be speaking about the shift from traditional intranet and portal environments to digital workplaces.  He has been working in the area of collaboration and communication for years and has seen how the thinking, experimentation and solutions have evolved to achieve business goals and objectives.

1.      From your experience, how do companies and government differ in their approach to adopting social workplace practices? 

Surprisingly, not as much as you would think. While both entities are different structurally, they share similar needs and interests; knowledge sharing, expertise location and employee engagement to name a few. Regulatory environments aside, the approaches to which these entities, whether private or public sector, take in adopting social workplace practices is more affected by organizational culture than any other attribute. I have seen the same type of approaches, as well as speed and success of implementation, in both public and private settings. It just depends on the culture, leadership and willingness of the entities to change.   

2.      How can a social intranet help a government workplace be more innovative?

Innovation often results from serendipitously connecting people and dots. Social intranets enable and speed this process by bringing unstructured information and previously unknown networks to the forefront of employee communication and collaboration. Government entities are by necessity hierarchical, structured and often complex. Social intranets can help a government workplace be more innovative by enabling information and person-to-person connections to flow freely without disrupting the necessary structures in place.  

Andy has trained and competed for the past three years with the Heroes Foundation Cycling Team and we wanted to know if he was able to apply what he has learnt from his past time to his work.

3.     What have you learned from cycling and racing that can be applied to bringing about change in an organization?   

  • It’s a long race, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sprint several times throughout it. [Don’t be afraid to push things a little faster from time to time]
  • You do not know what is possible until you try and that’s when you realize that anything is possible.  [Even organizations seamlessly adopting new processes and collaborating together] 
  • It is better to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable than to try to live and work in a false world of comfort.  [This is how progress and innovation happen]
  • Your brakes can be your worst enemy and cause more accidents than they prevent. Be careful when to apply them.  [Be careful when deciding to stop an initiative]
  • A well organized team (peleton) will out race an individual in almost any situation.  [A well organized team will break down barriers and silos and make more progress]
  • The same road looks different depending on the day.  [Do not be too quick judge your organization and its ability]
  • A very slight adjustment (seat height, pedal stroke, gearing) can make a world of performance difference.  [Small steps and improvements can cause big advancements]
  • Time is a man made concept. If you are creative, there is always time. [Being too busy is no excuse]
See you at #PSE2011!

Weaving a tapestry of ideas and people

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Update: For results from the 2011 and 2012 conferences please see the PS Engage Resources post.

As many of you know I am helping to put together a networking and learning event as part of the @PSLeader initiative started by Jeff Ashcroft, Jeff is the same guy that got me into doing the #GovChat series of twitter chats, it all started with a comment on a blog post here.

Anyway, when I was part of the Public Service I was involved in the first Collaborative Management day and was excited about it, basically I think the whole #w2p #goc3 thing is awesome. Sadly, now that I am Private Sector I can’t participate in the same way, so that got me to thinking and…

…a while ago, a group of us in the shadow public service were chatting and felt that it might be a good idea to create an event that builds on the #goc3 momentum for collaborative management.  Of course if we were going to do something it had to have value over and above what an internal conference could provide. The logic we came up with goes something like this:

If the focus of the Collaborative Management events is learning from others inside the Public Service, (and there’s  lots to learn), then  PS Engage distinguishes itself by emphasizing relevant ideas from outside the Government of Canada.  Strategically this makes sense because exposing yourself to ideas outside of your norm is an essential ingredient for innovation. So the focus for us became about bringing new and relevant ideas to the table.

When we started to reach out for speakers, the response was overwhelming with the likes of Mr. GovLoop, Steve Ressler and Ina Parvanova, Director of Public Affairs for the Mayo Clinic, among the luminaries  agreeing to share their stories with us.  Just recently, TBS President, Tony Clement’s office confirmed that he will be giving the opening address—for a conference focused on bringing lessons of change to Ottawa, I can’t think of a more relevant opening speaker.

Speaking of fiscal restraint, lets not panic about cut backs and such. To my way of thinking, financial pressure is a tremendous opportunity when it forces us to look for new ways of doing things. After all, necessity is the mother of invention, or at least that is what my mother used to say—so  come to PS Engage and help invent something great.

As a privately funded event we have to charge, the cost of bringing speaker’s in from out-of-town is significant, however we have managed to keep the price reasonable at $499.00.  Any profit from the event will go towards funding further exploration of the Virtual Government Network Concept.

Group discounts are available, (5 for the price of 4), and if you are student who really wants to go, tell me why you need to attend and how much you can afford, and I will see what we can do.

As an educator, it is great to be part of putting this together, and between the speakers and the networking opportunities I am pretty confident that the conference will be a high impact/low-cost learning event.  PS Engage, a tapestry of ideas and people, the perfect complement to Collaborative Management Day and a great way to get ready for change—what do you think?

Registration is open now, so get out your corporate credit card and go to www.psengage.org, if you need to put it in your learning plan you will find some learning objectives on the site to help you out with the words.

Hope to see you there, if you have any thoughts about this event or ideas for a future one, please share.

Thom

Of course you can follow along on twitter @psengage and #pse2011

Canadian Public Health Conference: Papers & Keynote Presentation

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Last week (June 2011), I had the great pleasure of being part of the Canadian Public Health Association conference in Montreal. I attended the three days, participated in two panels, met a lot of great people and generally learned a bunch.  During the plenary panel that I took part in I mentioned a couple of papers that might be of interest. I am putting them here to make them easy to find and to encourage feedback. Apparently there was video of the session as well, if and when I get my hands on it I will share.

Framework for a Virtual Government Network (.pdf)

This is my reflection paper for the course; Information, People and Society from the Centre for Advanced Management Education at Dalhousie University.  Part of the Masters in Information Management I am pursuing. In it I propose a framework for multi-jurisdictional collaboration.

Embrace the complexity (.pdf)

This is my first contribution to the discussion around applying complexity theory to the problem of managing knowledge in the Canadian Health Sector. Here is the KM complexity presentation to go with the paper of the same name.

UPDATE:

I have posted the presentations on SlideShare

Let me know if you have any thoughts.

Thom

Library 2.0

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I am delighted to be able to agree to  run a morning session at the May 6, 2011 meeting of the Eastern Canada Chapter of the Special Libraries Association.  The session consists of two parts:

  • Part 1 – 90 minutes – Use of social media in a professional context: why, when, and how to help users navigate (training and marketing).
  • Part 2 – 60 minutes – Major tools to become an effective social media librarian/professional

As part of my research to prepare the content for these two sessions I thought I would ask you. What do you think I should talk about that would be relevant to this elite group of  Information Management professionals?  Any favorite resources or stories of how Social Media makes the Library Profession more effective?  Any other advice?

Thanks in advance

Thom

UPDATE – May 6, 2011

Wendy and I had a wonderful time speaking with the 50 librarians today.   I have attached a PDF version of the completed presentation.  Thanks to the SLA for having us and once  again thanks to everyone that helped during the research phase.

Special Libraries Association (SLA) and Social Media May 2011  (PDF)

What is Public Service culture?

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Oct. 2013 UPDATE:  You may also be interested in this post which delves a little deeper into the idea of public service culture and Gov 2.0.
———————

I am preparing to facilitate a workshop on overcoming cultural roadblocks to Web 2.0 at the Social Media in Government conference in Ottawa on Sept 27-03.  As part of the background for the discussion, I am trying to synthesize three things.

  1. A working definition of culture
  2. A description of the existing and emergent culture in Public Service (Federal, Provincial and Municipal)
  3. A description of a future culture that we can aspire to create within our sphere’s of influence.

We have had some twitter exchanges about #2 and to provide a little more detail for those that are interested, here are 4 early stage slides for your perusal and comment.

I look forward to exploring this area with you.

Also if you mention my name or code SPK you can save $400 on the conference.

Thom’s Top Ten #g2e 2010 edition

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Back in May I wrote about attending Gov 2.0 Expo, in that post I promised to share some of what I learned. In short, it was an intense three days, lots of great presentations, and more importantly dozens of interesting and insightful conversations.  Here is my report.

1.  Top quote

I thought this was a very mature statement.

” web 2.0 tools are not something we need to learn to use, but environments we need to learn to live in.” Jack Holt, Dept. of Defense

For other things I thought were cool at the time you can check out my twitter feed from the conference.

2. Thou shalt engage

There is a ton of civic and employee consultation going on south of the 49th parallel. It seemed like every second presentation was about some form of engagement, mostly using the tool made available by GSA to all agencies, a good example is GSA’s own consultation.

With all this activity going on I expect we will see some more lessons learned in the next few months at WebContent.gov, but two early conclusions appeared in my mind:

  1. A broad national conversation is difficult if not impossible and of limited value.
    There are simply too many voices. Maybe when semantic analysis improves it will be practical but for now focus is essential.
  2. Follow-up is critical. You need to know what you are planning on doing with the input,  be transparent about your intentions and follow through. Be sincere and prepare for the unexpected.  See this post from David Eaves for some perspective on what can happen.

David also had a wonderful keynote at the show about open data, baseball and government. You can watch it here.

For a Canadian perspective on engagement check out what the folks at Ottawa based Publivate are up to.

3. The big systems are coming

The early days of web 2.0 are rapidly coming to a close and I am seeing more and more big systems thinking entering the conversations. This is both good and bad. The good part is when the big systems are viewed as ecosystems with permeable barriers between components. The bad part is when those big systems encourage silos and are not designed to get better the more people use them.  I am not sure if this is an observation from #g2e or just a recent reflection, but there you go – beware of big systems that encourage silos.

4. You can still do a lot with a little

The City of Manor, pop 5,800 showed us how creative partnerships with innovative thinking could accomplish some really interesting things. The image that sticks with me is the bar code stickers on the side of city trucks. Check out the presentation.

5. We have begun to move from rhetoric to results

I think it was Gwynne Kostin at the General Services Administration, Office of New Media and Citizen Engagement, who said this to me and I felt the same. Compared to previous conferences , there was not quite so much enthusiastic arm waving going on. The mood was a little more serious, a little more thoughtful. I think these are the signs of a movement that is maturing.

6. Culture change is the elephant in the room

This thing called culture frequently comes up as something that needs to change. We talk about it a bit and then conveniently move on to something else.  What I almost never hear is the idea that culture is about people. For culture to change, people need to change.

Unfortunately that means you and I have to change.

I had breakfast with the amazing culture change artist Kitty Wooley (@kwooleyy) which led to a guest blog about how hard it can be to change, even when you want. You can read the post at the Senior Fellows and Friends blog .

As a former advertising guy, I am real interested in if, and how we can influence culture change.

7. Canada is seriously behind in some respects

I had the opportunity to chat a little with Senator Kate Lundy from Australia and learned about their Declaration of Open Government based on the three key principles of Informing, Engaging and Participating. Of course Obama has the Open Government Directive and I certainly heard the mantra of Transparency, Participation, Collaboration more than once.

I look forward to hearing something similar from our government….but I am not holding my breath.

8. But we might be ahead on the inside

Of the people I spoke with and certainly in the US and Australia there is nothing quite like the Canadian Government’s GCPEDIA.  For the most part silos persist and efforts to improve internal collaboration are just beginning with initiatives like FedSpace generating a fair bit of discussion on govloop.  Incidentally I had great chats with Emma Antunes who is on loan to FedSpace from NASA, and Mr. govloop himself, Steve Ressler.

9. We need a trusted GC url shortner

It seems like a small thing, but a trusted government URL shortened is essential for gov 2.0. The US version was launched at the show  http://go.usa.gov/.  I am pretty sure there is no official effort underway to do something similar in Canada, although I understand there is a page in GCPEDIA about it.  If anyone has an update, please let me know.

Oh yes, it needs to come with metrics. Lots of metrics.

10. People will engage for their reasons, not yours

Kathy Sierra gave a great short keynote on Creating Passionate Citizens that I would recommend you watch. Who knew that pets were a gateway drug to passion?  Video of Kathy’s talk at Gov 2.0 Expo.

There is lots of other video from the expo.

11. The more things change the more they stay the same

Web 2.0 technology is fun and amazing but when you get right down to it, social networks are about connecting people, and people connect (or not) depending on how well they communicate. There is noting new about that.

There is also nothing new about the power struggles going on all over the place. A disruption is underway and people are seeking advantage. What I think is different this time, is the potential for the “power of the masses” to be put to work on positive change.  Millions of people can now come together at very little cost. I am excited about what can happen, and worried that it won’t.

I have to stop now, there is more, lots more but now its your turn.

This post also appears on govloop