Friday and Saturday of last week saw the inaugural Government 2.0 Camp unconference (an unconference is basically an unstructured conference, where every attendee is a participant and potential presenter. Some unconferences are like Fight Club — if it’s your first time, you have to present.)
Government 2.0 Camp was all about bringing together people — government, academia, nonprofit, private sector — interested in applying all this great Web 2.0, social media, and online community stuff to government — particularly, in light of the specific challenges that government faces.
I’ll be doing a few more posts about some specific issues I picked up on from Government 2.0 Camp, so I will spare you a blow-by-blow retelling of the event — check out the river of Twitter posts tagged #gov20camp, the great session listings and recaps at the Government 2.0 Club site, and the search results for “gov20camp” for blog entries, photos, video, and other media generated by the event.
Instead, here are a few general notes:
* The event ran Friday and Saturday. Unconferences I’ve typically been to are weekend-only, though paradoxically, the Friday session was meant (I presume) to attract more government types. After all, who wants to sacrifice a full weekend when you can get a paid day off?
* The event was free to attendees (thanks to the many sponsors), so the organizers limited the registrations to non-government folk early, to ensure a good mix of government and private sector. In practice, though, no one was checking names at the door, so anyone could have come in.
In another one of those paradoxical things, maybe government types should be charged a few hundred bucks. After all, there’s the mentality of “How could anything free be any good?” (Hence the perpetual conference / junket racket that caters to government and corporate clients.)
* The first day started out with a round-the-room introduction of all the participants. Since we were in an auditorium of about 500 people, this felt like a Really Bad Idea That Would Take Forever, but it actually worked out pretty well — people were limited to saying:
1. Their name
2. Their affiliation (title, company — some folks got a little more advertising mileage out of this than others)
3. Three words — tags, if you will — to describe their expertise, interests, or what they wanted to get from the day (Me: “Just. Another. Consultant.”)
4. A session topic (if they were interested in leading a session).
Having an event-wide introduction also made sense, because it helped identify the different government entities in the room and what they were trying to get out of it. Off the top of my head, represented agencies included: Homeland Security / TSA, Agriculture, FTC, DoD, State Department, the Maryland Governor’s Office, Air Force [the best represented of the service branches, I think], Navy, Army, IRS, NOAA, EPA, HHS, EEOC, NASA, Library of Congress, and the White House.
* There were a lot of sessions — about 14 simultaneous sessions in each day’s 4-5 slots. The organizers did a pretty good job of scheduling sessions and consolidating them as needed (which is one way from keeping unconference sessions from turning into complete chaos). Though with 13 other sessions going on at any one time, there’s bound to be buyer’s remorse.
Unconference etiquette specifically encourages you to get up and switch to another session if you feel like it (monitoring the Twitter stream comes in handy for this), but in reality, switching sessions midstream is kind of like channel-switching: If you do too much, you’re not going to get anything from any session.
Anyway, I’ll get into some specific issues in later posts, so I’ll just say here that it was a really good event, organized by a few motivated individuals, at no cost to the taxpaying public. And I was glad to see the various government agencies represented — some were a little farther than others, but then you don’t really need to meet the people who “get” it — you need to meet the people who don’t (yet).
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