The two-day Open Gov West conference (and un-conference) in Seattle this past weekend, organized by Knowledge as Power, brought together a diverse crowd of open government thinkers and practitioners. A number of private sector innovators, academics and non-profit leaders joined public administrators and officials from the Seattle area as well as those visiting from British Columbia in a multi-faceted discussion on topics ranging from data liberation to public engagement. Day one of the conference followed a traditional format of speeches and panel discussions, while on the second day, a bar camp format was chosen to facilitate small-group dialogue in sessions put forth by conference participants in the morning.
Illustration: Our Open Gov West Twitter word cloud (click on the image for a link to the raw data)
The New York State Senate CIO, Andrew Hoppin, who was invited as the keynote speaker, presented his work which by many is considered a landmark effort in the field. While the event’s focus was on open government, and the majority of participants were active in the open data movement as well as the area of citizen engagement and IT services for public administration, some work on participation projects was also introduced. Travis Triplean for example of the University of Washington presented some research on process and systems design for large-scale consultation platforms, and Rob Hoehn of Ideascale was there to speak about that company’s experiences with the realization of the federal government’s open government initiatives across all departments. A common theme throughout the discussions at Open Gov West was how to work with governments and how to successfully engage a broad range of citizens. The fortunate presence of a considerable number of “non-techies” ensured that discussions produced ideas for very wholesome approaches to citizen engagement and public dialogue. The importance of face-to-face communication has not been rendered void by the increasingly dazzling number of iPhone apps and governmental blogs or 311 systems.
Photo: Intellitics founder and CEO Tim Bonnemann (right) and intern Sebastian Haselbeck (middle) at the wrap-up session at the end of day two
Overall, the event connected a very interesting group of people with each other. Many creative ideas were tossed around and one future collaboration or the other was kicked off. The event was organized quite well, and especially the first day was quite amazing. On the downside, the second day saw a sharp drop in the number of attendees, and many of the later sessions suffered from that and the way the sessions were introduced and distributed. An earlier promotion during the event of the OGW wiki would have yielded a powerful knowledge base around the event’s debates and could have served as a launch pad for ideas, networking and idea-gathering.
