Four Steps to Gov 2.0: A Guide for Agencies

by Greg Whisenant | comments: 0

What Does the World Look Like When the Work of Government is Driven by the People?

Gov 2.0 has a lot of definitions, but in observing the exciting breadth of projects currently being built, it feels a little like the Blind Men and the Elephant, where everyone defines it based on their first hand experience, but not from a holistic view. In its essence, Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Gov 2.0 is where government acts as the catalyst to let others build upon its work h — and most importantly, to multiply its impact.

For the first time in history, we’re really at a point where this is technologically feasible. Even if you have no specific tie to government, Gov 2.0 envisions a world in which — just by having experience and interests — ordinary members of the public willingly contribute to the knowledge, facts and policies that comprise our government. It might be as easy as carrying your cell phone. And it might take just 30 seconds.

In December, the Obama Administration released its long awaited Open Government Directive, which was met with enthusiasm from some, and an underwhelmed “meh” from others. The Administration has asked state and local government to adopt the Directive, but it still begs the question:

If I am an agency head and want to embrace Gov 2.0, what should I do first?

Right now it’s a confusing whirlwind of options: Create raw datafeeds in machine readable formats? Create iPhone apps? Use a wiki internally? Create a Facebook group, a Facebook page? Start posting to Twitter? The choices are infinite, but the resources are most definitely limited.

Below is a starting discussion, a "Four Steps to Gov 2.0," designed to align the various Gov 2.0 stakeholders - individuals, governments, private companies, elected officials - toward the same goal in pursuit of open and participatory government. It applies to all levels of government at the federal, state, and local level. It attempts to structure an agency’s actions as prioritized consecutive steps, in a way that will reward those that adhere to it with more power, better engagement, and future compatibility with other government agencies, private companies, experts, and the general public. Even a few years ago, it would have been technologically impossible or at least prohibitively expensive. Now, the biggest obstacle is simply a plan and the political will.

It's most definitely an amalgam of many different ideas, especially Clay Shirky’s idea of convening the conversation, and the Obama Administration’s ideas around releasing high value datafeeds and making government transparent, participatory and collaborative. It prioritizes the steps, and finally, introduces the idea of an API that creates a virtuous cycle by returning crowdsourced value back to the agency.

Four Steps to Gov 2.0

1. First and foremost, “convene the conversation.” Governments that want to win should first maximize the free contributions of the general public and experts for issues handled by that agency. Focus on creating the systems to foster self-organization and moderation (think user voting, forum moderation, and social reputation).

Before all else, this should be the first — and only — goal of agencies at every level. The original Obama campaign site and Peer to Patent are great examples, and several other early examples are starting to emerge.

2. Next, examine your agency’s data and put it into three “buckets”. If you have not completed #1, go back and do that first because you’re leaving a valuable resource on the table. The buckets are:

• Define high value data sets that can be shared in machine-readable format. This is data that is not updated frequently, never anticipates the need for improvement, and is generally referential in nature. Examples might include historical spending, infrastructure details, and census-like data.
• Define high value data sets than can be interacted with via an API. This is data that anticipates improvement from the public, and/or which regularly needs to stay updated by the agency. Examples might include permits, locations of buildings, and crime data.
• Define the data types that are not shared, period. Shine a bright light on these data types, and make very clear statements as to why they are not shared. If “getting to the data” is the reason for not sharing, put that to the community and you will be able to find someone to help you get that data out for free. Examples are data that is already protected by law, or which contains personally identifiable information.

3. Next, build the datafeeds, because they will help maximize the public’s information and contribution in Step #1. Push this data to the public in machine-readable formats: XML, RSS, or CSV, accessible via Web services.

4. After the datafeeds are complete, build the API. Look at this as a social compact, where as part of the exchange, companies and members of the public are able to return value back to the agency, creating an infinite loop of ever improving data. Use it to generate mechanical turk-like assistance from the public. I’ll explain some of the key components of an effective Gov 2.0 API in a future post.

After these steps have been accomplished, look at building a regular Web site, specific applications, and services. Agencies that prioritize in this order won’t put themselves at risk of building social silos (these are social networks that end at the boundary of the town, state, or agency).

I’ll consider each of these steps individually in subsequent blog posts. If you have more ideas, please let me know here or send a note at greg [at] crimereports.com.

Playing With Foursquare Data

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 0

Foursquare is the new Dodgeball. Which is to say that it is my (and many other people's) method for tracking where we go (and in most cases our social activities). On a daily basis I use the iPhone app to announce some of my whereabouts to friends. I share specifics selectively, but in aggregate my information is shared publicly. (Disclosure: Foursquare is an OATV investment)

Foursquare has a lot of data about me and I willingly give it more most days. Foursquare lets me check-in to a specific location. I earn badges based on where I check-in, how often, and with whom for the various cities I am in. In addition to letting me share my movements with friends I am building up a history of places -- not just points. Foursquare uses OAuth to let me share these places.

WhereDoYouGo is an ITP project that creates a custom-colored heat map of your Foursquare haunts. You can generate maps for any city you've used Foursquare in. It was written in python and runs on Google App Engine. The team also acknowledges the following projects: Mike Knapp's OAuth library, the Google Maps API, the gheat-ae (and gheat) Google Code projects, jQuery, and Blueprint CSS.
(via Gizmodo)

Last Night's Checkins, created by the seemingly ubiquitous Barbarian Group, sends me a mail (almost) every day listing the previous day's venues. I diligently fill in a brief note under each checkin about what I did and mail it back. I never have to visit the site. I love apps that interact with me only as much as necessary (Tripit is another great example of an email using webapp). I had signed up for this as a lark after reading about it on Techcrunch, but now find it to be a useful tool.

Mobzombies is a soon-to-be-released iPhone game (I first played it several years ago on custom hardware) . The game overlays a virtual game level complete with obstacles and zombies to chase you. You can save your character by running around (the game uses the accelerometer to track your movements). The Foursquare tie-in is not intuitive, but is pretty clever. The number of checkins influences the number of zombies spawned -- more friends equals more zombies. Sometimes there are advantages to drinking alone. The app has been submitted to the App Store.

Foursquare isn't just a geo platform. One of the things that sets it apart is its use of game mechanics to incentivize people to keep using it. The more you use it the more badges you get. Soon Foursquare will open their platform and allow custom badges to be created. Until then to get a custom badge you'll have to use Waze, the only external service that has its own Foursquare badge. The pairing makes sense as Waze uses game mechanics to get people to use their GPS program (Radar post).

You can see all of the current Foursquare API apps (like place-ranking site SocialGreat) in their developer portal.

Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare and Dodgeball, will be speaking about the use of game mechanics at Where 2.0 this March.

The War For the Web

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 66

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work.

If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you.

As it turns out, it wasn't just links imported from Twitter. All outbound links were temporarily disabled, unless users explicitly added them as links via an "attach" dialogue. I went to Facebook, and tried posting a link to this blog directly in my status feed, and saw the same behavior: links were no longer automatically made clickable. You can see that in the image that is the destination of the first link in this piece.

The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again. The consensus was that it was in fact a bug, but it's little surprise that people suspected otherwise, given the increasing amount of effort Facebook puts into warning people that they are leaving Facebook for the big bad unsafe Internet:

All of this is well-intentioned, I'm sure. After all, Facebook is attempting to put in place privacy controls that allow its users to manage the visibility of their information -- and the Web's expectation of universal visibility is not necessarily the best default for much of the information posted on Facebook. But let's not kid ourselves: Facebook is a new kind of web site (or an old kind redux), a world of its own, playing by different rules.

But this isn't just about Facebook.

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits - there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can't access key aspects of the phone with Apple's permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn't shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

And now, of course, we see the latest salvo in the war against the accepted rules of interoperability on the web: Rupert Murdoch's threat to take the Wall Street Journal out of the Google search index. While most people have repeated the existing wisdom that to do so would be suicide for the Journal, a few contrarian observers have noted the leverage Murdoch holds. Mark Cuban argues that Twitter now trumps search engines when it comes to breaking news. Even more provocatively, Jason Calacanis suggested, a few weeks before Murdoch's announcement, that all big media companies need to do to cut Google off at the knees would be to block Google, while cutting an exclusive deal with Bing to be found only in Microsoft's search index.

Of course, Google wouldn't take that lying down, and would likely make its own exclusive deals, leading to a showdown that would make the browser wars of the 90s seem tame.

I'm not saying that News Corp and other mainstream media publications would adopt Jason's suggested strategy, or that it would work if they did, but it is becoming clear to me that we are heading into a bloody period of competition that could be extremely unfriendly to the interoperable web as we know it today.

If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. (Check out the program for the first O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in 2002 (pdf).) In my talks over the years, I've argued that there are two models of operating system, which I have characterized as "One Ring to Rule Them All" and "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," with the latter represented by a routing map of the Internet.

The first is the winner-takes-all world that we saw with Microsoft Windows on the PC, a world that promises simplicity and ease of use, but ends up diminishing user and developer choice as the operating system provider.

The second is an operating system that works like the Internet itself, like the web, and like open source operating systems like Linux: a world that is admittedly less polished, less controlled, but one that is profoundly generative of new innovations because anyone can bring new ideas to the market without having to ask permission of anyone.

I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.

One of the points I've made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly.

And so we've grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we've been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.

But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I've been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications. I noted this first with speech recognition, but it's had the biggest business impact so far in location-based services.

A few weeks ago, Google offered free turn-by-turn directions for Android phones. This is awesome news for consumers, who previously could get this only in dedicated GPS devices or with high-priced iPhone apps. But it's also a sign just how competitive the web is getting, and just how powerful Google is getting, because they understand that "data is the Intel Inside" of the next generation of computer applications.

Nokia paid $8 billion for NavTeq, the leading provider of such turn-by-turn directions. GPS-maker TomTom paid $3.7 billion for TeleAtlas, the #2 provider in the market. Google quietly built an equivalent service, and is now giving it away for free -- but only to their own business partners. Everyone else still has to pay high fees to NavTeq and TeleAtlas. What's more, Google upped the ante by adding in such features as Street View.

Most interestingly, this move sets the stage for the future competition between Google and Apple. (Bill Gurley's analysis is an essential read.) Apple controls access to the dominant device of the mobile web; Google controls access to one of the most important mobile applications, and so far, is making it available for free only on Android. Google's prowess is not just in search, but in mapping, speech recognition, automated translation, and other applications driven by huge, intelligent databases that only a few providers can offer. Microsoft and Nokia control comparable assets, but they too are Apple competitors, and unlike Google, their business model depends on selling access to those assets, not giving them away for free.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late.

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

I'll be speaking on this topic in my keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York on Tuesday. I'll look forward to seeing many of you there.

Ignite NYC on 11/16: Gov 2.0, Body Hacks, and Hi-Tech Craft

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 0

The Web 2.0 Expo starts tomorrow, 11/16, in NYC. We're kicking off the conference with an Ignite featuring 14 great speakers. The event is at the New World Stages. I'll be co-hosting with Ignite NYC organizer Tikva Morowati.

As always each speaker gets just five minutes on stage. Their presentation will each be just 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds. The Speakers include:

* Alison Lewis, http://www.iheartswitch.com/ (high tech craft)
* Brady Forrest, http://radar.oreilly.com/brady/ (Burning Man as tech incubator)
* Casey Pugh, http://www.starwarsuncut.com/
* Hilary Mason, http://www.hilarymason.com
* Jennifer Pahlka, http://www.codeforamerica.org/ (Gov 2.0)
* Jonathan Brill, http://Productlust.com, http://www.multitouchmaven.com
* Judy Shapiro, http://trenchwars.wordpress.com
* Kevin Marks, http://epeus.blogspot.com/
* Leesean Hepnova, http://www.leesean.net
* Lauren Schmidt, http://www.mit.edu/~lschmidt
* Molly Wright Steenson, http://www.girlwonder.com
* Nora Abousteit, http://www.burdastyle.com
* Patrick Davidson, http://Whereikeepmythingsontheinternet.com
* Quinn Norton, http://quinnnorton.com/ (body hacks)
* Ray Beckerman, http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com
* Tony Haille, http://tonyhaile.com

Here is a rough schedule for how the night will go:

7:00 pm - Doors Open for Conference & Expo Plus Pass holders
7:30 pm - Doors Open for Expo Plus Pass holders
7:45 pm - Doors Open for general public attendees (pending capacity)
8:00- 8:15 - Mobile Music Competition
8:15- 9:45PM - Ignite Talks
10PM -- Bar closes

We are going to start the evening off with an Ignite Mobile Music Competition, giving you a chance to win a FREE pass to Web 2.0! We will provide the mini cord, you provide the mobile instrument. Recommended apps include Sonifi, Drumbanger, and Bloom. Please fill out this entry form if you'd like to show off your mobile music making skills!

We will also randomly choose one lucky Twitter user who tweets using http://bit.ly/IgniteWeb20 to win a FREE pass to Web 2.0 Expo NY. You must show up at Ignite to win!

RSVP on Facebook

Web 2.0 Summit Starts Today

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 1

Last year at Web 2.0 Summit, one prominent tech executive responded to our focus on "Web meets World" -- the way web technology is being used to attack the world's problems -- by saying "I don't come to this conference to learn how to do good. I come to learn about trends that are going to affect my business."

As it turns out, the "Web meets World" theme was in fact exactly on point with the trends that were going to affect his business. What Fred Wilson calls "the golden triangle" of Web meets World trends -- mobile, social, and real-time -- are at the heart of many of the cutting edge non-profit activities we showed last year, and they are very much at the heart of the for-profit companies following hard on their heels.

I've written a much longer paper on this subject - Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On, and I won't repeat that there. But that's the theory. The practice is how entrepreneurs are taking advantage of these disruptive trends, how big companies are responding, and what kind of infrastructure changes we'll need to support the future that is coming at us.

This year at the Web 2.0 Summit, we'll be hearing how real-time, social, and mobile play out in the strategy of Google, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, News Corp, AOL, Comcast, Nokia, and even GE, but we'll also be hearing from entrepreneurs, and yes, even some more innovative hackers who are helping birth the future away from the commercial limelight.

The official sessions are great, but it's the hallway conversations that can really set your mind off in a new direction. For example, at a pre-Summit event last night, I had a fascinating conversation with Marc Pincus of Zynga last night about his belief that the third great internet business model has arrived. Fortunately, you don't need to bump into Marc to hear what he thinks: he's speaking this afternoon at 4:15. He's put his ideas about social selling into practice, with 129 million users playing Zynga games each month, spending millions of dollars on virtual goods. But what's most fascinating is how Marc sees the potential to apply social gaming principles to all of e-commerce. His riff on how what's he's learned applies to Amazon (and anyone else selling on the web) is worth the price of admission to the Summit.

I hope to see you at the Summit. John Battelle and I kick off the show with opening remarks at 2 pm at the Westin Market Street in San Francisco.

Social Networking is the Means to Achieve Workplace Collaboration

by Mark Drapeau | @cheeky_geeky | comments: 12

Yesterday I live-blogged a bit from the terrific Government 2.0 event produced by FedScoop.com at the Newseum in Washington, DC. I wrote a post about how collaboration was not the means, but rather an end made possible by the means of social networking tools. You can read my original writing and some initial comments here. Below, I expand a bit on these ideas.

My post was initially inspired by one speaker's (WFED's Chris Dorobek) notion, shared by some others (Justin Houk commented that, "Taxpayers don't want to think about those in government sitting around on Twitter all day even thought that might be an effective way to collaborate."), that social networking tools come across as too social or "fun" and that being social is not what people are truly doing (in the government) when they use them - they're collaborating. Thus, when marketing Government 2.0 to wider audiences, he feels that a term like "collaboration tools" is more appropriate.

In my opinion, while this might sound better to a more traditionalist, untrained ear, I think it is factually wrong to say that things like Facebook or Intellipedia are collaboration tools. True, collaboration often happens with these tools. And perhaps one could argue that collaboration is mainly what people hope to accomplish with them in the workplace. Fair enough. But I think that collaboration is the end result of leveraging social networks, which is in actuality what the social networking tools are for.

In other words, social networks are a means by which to accomplish something. This something might very well be collaboration. It might also be putting together an office softball team, or a study group of employees all learning Arabic. Is arranging players on a softball team "collaboration"? I don't think so. Is it an important part of a coherent, productive workplace? Perhaps. There are many important things that happen in workplaces based around social networks that are not strictly collaboration on work projects.

One big thing I've been thinking about lately is "leveraging social networks to accomplish important stuff" and no one can deny that personal relationships can influence collaboration. How well you know someone, how much you identify with them, how much you trust them, their level of reliability or transparency - all of these are values derived from social networking that then, when leveraged, can influence collaboration. Collaboration is not an end in itself, of course - it is a means to accomplish some end (finishing a draft report, etc.). So, social networking is a means to collaboration, which is a means to achieving some work or personal goal.

I also reject the notion that there is something wrong with having some fun at work. The idea that having fun with social software shouldn't be allowed in serious workplaces is ridiculous. And of course, anyone who's ever passed around a joke-of-the-week email, celebrated a colleague's birthday with a cake in the break room, or ended work at 4pm for an informal happy hour with the office (i.e., effectively every government and corporate employee) would surely agree with me on this. Work can be fun and be productive, too. The director of the Office of Personnel Management recently visited Google for a reason.

So, briefly, I think social networking tools are not necessarily collaboration tools. They are social software that allows social networks to be leveraged to accomplish things you find important. That might be collaboration on a National Intelligence Estimate (protecting America, earning your paycheck), or arranging a carpool with people in your agency (getting to work on time, being more green), or finding a racquetball partner (staying healthy, living well, bonding) - all of which postitively influence the workplace, in government and in the private sector as well.

As Fred Wellman commented on my original post, "I can't help but wonder if Chris [Dorobek] is seeking a more politically correct or business sounding name of the same tools with the goal of breaking down barriers to implementation and usage as opposed to a lack of understanding of the power of social networking applications in the business of government." I think there's a lot of truth to that. But I also think that, as an academic, this is actually not what we are doing.

This may sound a bit esoteric, but from an academic standpoint I think pointing out that using social networks - online and off - is at the very core of what we are doing is an important thing to point out. When we are "collaborating," we are leveraging social networks to accomplish important stuff.

Where 2.0 CFP Extended

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 0

Every year Where 2.0 is a gathering of mapping companies, and geohackers. This year there will be a lot of discussion about mobile apps (iPhone vs, Android vs. Pre vs. Nokia), user-contributed geodata (like Waze and Google Building Maker), temporal mapping, government geodata (like Data SF), augmented reality (like Wikitude), and the geolocated web. We've extended the CFP entry deadline until October 20th. If you've got something to contribute then submit a talk for the CFP now.

I've included some of the topics that we are looking for after the jump

(continue reading)

Four short links: 28 September 2009

Science Blogs, Concussion Games, Packet Sniffer, and an Astonishing Product Name

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Sci Blogs -- aggregated and hosted blogs from New Zealand scientists and researchers. A planet aggregator has become a key part of building a community, even outside programming.
2. Super Better, or How To Turn Recovery Into a Game -- Jane McGonigal had a concussion, and created a game to keep her doing things that aided her recovery. Interesting discussion of how to build a game around a serious real-life problem. And honestly, people: if she can make concussion into a game, surely you can make your crap websites suck less?
3. Justniffer -- packet sniffer that identifies HTTP requests and emits an Apache-style logfile showing what was requested. (via Simon Willison)
4. Vegemite Names New Spread -- the original name was crowdsourced in 1923. They decided to repeat the process for their new product, a spread made from Vegemite and Cream Cheese. The winning name came from an Australian web designer: "Vegemite iSnack 2.0". This does not appear to be a joke (no mention that the commercial will use music from Rick Astley). Unsure which will make Americans more ill: the name, the idea of eating Vegemite mixed with cream cheese, or the idea of eating Vegemite at all.

A Computing Future from Microsoft: Large and Cheap Displays

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 5

Chris Pratley, the head of Microsoft's Office Labs, gave the PICNIC audience a peek into the future they envision when planning their products. What is that future? It was encapsulated in the above video that they made a year ago. Some of the technologies (Augmented Reality and realtime language translation for example) have already come to the fruition (and they are going to need to make a new video soon before it all happens).

An initial viewing of the video shows that Chris and his team (and Microsoft in general) are concerned with screens of all sizes - from 10-foot wallscreen to 2-inch boarding passes. In all of these displays they imagine that the screen is also the interface. How will the current interfaces scale? For larger ones there is a concern for how to keep the controls near the user. For smaller ones there is no room for controls. The screens will be maneuvered by making the back touch sensitive (called Nanotouch). One of the key Microsoft researchers in this area is Patrick Baudisch.

These interfaces are possible now. I have played with Nanotouch devices at MSR -- some no larger than a 50 cent piece. And not only are the larger displays possible, they will potentially be cheap. The picture below is a new MSR project that shows one method for creating large scale screens cheaply. It uses a pico projector that is the size of the phone and a specially cut piece of plexiglass. The image below shows a display that is only ~2 feet tall, but you can imagine this working at 10 feet. Chris stated that the size of the display is bounded by the projector's brightness and that pico projector brightness is doubling every 9 months. In the future cameras can be added to allow for gestures on the interface.

Startups! Enter the Web 2.0 Expo Launchpad by 9/25

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 3

Startups provide the lifeblood (and R&D) for the web. Each year at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC (and SF) we celebrate their collective accomplishments by highlighting a few of their number during the Launchpad. This year's Launchpad will occur the morning of 11/15. We are looking for five great startups to demo onstage and handle questions from our judges like Nate Westheimer. I'll be hosting the event. I also spend time with each startup before the event reviewing and critiquing their demo. Past Expo Launchpad participants include 80Legs, Nitobi's PhoneGap (SF 2009 winner), and Triggit. The details are below:

For 2009, we continue the tradition of showcasing innovative and promising new companies at Web 2.0 Expo. While the definition of a launch has gotten cloudy in this age of public betas, we're looking for new companies or products that make us take notice. And while venture capital has been the focus in past years, the reality of the market is that companies must gain the attention of customers. So our judging panel and criteria this year focus more on what is essential and transformational in today's market than on ability to get funded. Along the way, we're sure the VCs in the crowd will find several startups they'd like to talk to!

The Approach
Entrants do not need to launch their company or a major product/service to qualify.
All proposals will be reviewed before Web 2.0 Expo by our panel.
The judging panel will be comprised of industry experts who will review Launch Pad companies for their value to their market (consumer, enterprise, etc.).
Judges will select about five finalists, each of whom will have five minutes to pitch on stage, in front of the Web 2.0 Expo audience (the largest gathering of the innovators in the Internet industry) and the panel.
Each company will receive feedback on its presentation from both the panel and the audience.

Launch Pad Finalists: The Chosen Five
Five companies will be chosen by a panel to present on stage at Web 2.0 Expo New York. Each will have five minutes to present their company or product and will receive real-time feedback from a panel of industry experts and the audience.

Submit Your Company for Launch Pad
To submit your company for participation in this year's Launch pad, please complete the submission form. All Launch Pad submissions are due by September 25, 2009.

If you have questions you can leave a comment on this post or ping me on Twitter.

Fallacious Celebrations of Facebook Fans

by Mark Drapeau | @cheeky_geeky | comments: 10

Publishing "top 10" lists is unfortunately a staple of modern journalism. But alas, writers must drive readers' eyeballs, even when discussing serious topics like the government. And so we find a new list that mixes Web 2.0 with the government: "Top 10 agencies with the most Facebook fans." For the record, this list is topped by the White House with 327,592 fans, followed by the Marine Corps, Army, CDC, State Department, NASA, NASA JPL, Library of Congress, Air Force, and Environmental Protection Agency. Congratulations to all these hard-working agencies.

But what exactly are we celebrating here? The fact that government agencies are embracing new technologies that the citizens they serve actually use? That's nice I suppose, but everyone from Papa John's Pizza to America's Next Top Model (200,000 more fans than the White House, cough) to someone I met once at a party during Internet Week has a Facebook "Fan Page" now, so surely we are not celebrating the mere presence of them. In fact, when everyone in my social circle's social circle asks me to become a fan of their long-standing charity, their favorite television program, or their single-person consulting firm, everything becomes a blur of meaningless, cheap invitations that become remarkably easy to decline. There is no value in simply having a fan page anymore. There may in fact be street cred in not feeling like you need one.

Are we applauding the government's fan numbers? The article leads with, "The White House currently has more fans than the Washington Redskins." The most powerful global seat of power in perhaps the most recognizable office building in the world has more fans than the local football team? Earth-shattering. Let's consider how popular the White House is. Facebook now has 300 million users; thus, approximately one out of every 1000 Facebook users is a "fan" of the White House. The other 999/1000 are not. And since many Facebook users live outside the U.S., one must assume that many White House fans do as well. Should every U.S. citizen using Facebook be a fan of the White House? Is that the goal? What's the marginal value of an additional 10,000 fans? Who knows.

Still, the White House shouldn't feel too bad about those stats. Rounding out the top 10, the EPA has convinced one of every 100,000 Facebook users to become their fans. Bravo. Let's keep this in perspective. Soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo has two fan pages that total four million fans. Julia Allison, who isn't even a real celebrity, has over 15,000 fans - if these numbers are in any way meaningful she's roughly as popular as the State Department, the agency heading up U.S. foreign policy. These numbers seem even worse when one considers that there are hundreds of U.S. Federal Government departments and agencies, many of which haven't a presence on Facebook or anything similar.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh. Let's assume for a minute that these agencies are genuinely touching microniches and that the fans, whatever their numbers, are indeed fanatical about these agencies. What is the government doing with that raving fan base? Not much. Facebook fan pages from the Army and CDC and State Department primarily re-post their own news from their own websites. I didn't see any original writing. I didn't even see aggregation of information about, say, foreign policy from other sources. I certainly didn't see any innovative contests from the Marine Corps, or crowdsourcing from NASA. And while there are fan comments posted on the pages, it's not obvious at all what is being done with that feedback, if anything. Make fun of Tyra Banks all you want, but her show's fan page has 286 discussion topics, hundreds of photos, headshots, names, and bios of people involved in the show, and listings of upcoming events. They're so organized at America's Next Top Model that we might consider asking their staff to inform people about the resurgent H1N1 flu virus.

If you think I'm joking about that, you probably have no business working with social media for the government.

The larger issue here is that the connection of any of these Facebook fan pages to agency goals and strategy is murky at best. As someone who spends a bit of time thinking about "Government 2.0," it's difficult to decipher how this is helping the government. True, the pages are somewhat informative, and to some degree they reach a citizen audience where they are. But it's not novel and it's not social and it's not engaging. The execution is flawed, the tactics are questionable, the strategy is vague, and the goals are unclear. And all the government pages in the top 10 list effectively look the same. Monkey-see, monkey-do.

My personal Facebook page has about 2,000 connections, but this by itself is nothing to celebrate. The meaningful question is not about who has more fans, but about who can authentically and transparently - and usefully - interact with citizens to provide social and intellectual value and become the pulse of their conversations. Here are some questions I have for governments and agencies running Facebook fan pages: What are the names of the people running the pages? What are their titles? What city is their office in? Where do they blog? Which events are they attending this year? (Can I meet them there?) How are you going to get your fans engaged in your mission? How can I tell you my stories about military service, or foreign travel, or amateur astronomy? Would those stories be helpful to you? How are you using social media like Facebook to get citizens involved in their government?

These are questions that departments and agencies, and private companies for that matter, should be asking themselves before they deploy official new media platforms like a Facebook fan page. The answers to these questions and others should be visible on day one. When the first White House memo of the new administration outlined the principles of a transparent, participatory, and collaborative government, this should have been obvious. It appears not to be so.

Submit a Talk For Ignite at PICNIC

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 0

This year we are going to Ignite PICNIC. PICNIC Network is an excellent conference in Amsterdam that is happening September 23-25. I attended last year and got a lot out of the combination of technology and art (Radar post). Other speakers this year include Nicolas Negroponte, Linda Stone, Kevin Slavin and many others.

PICNIC is a part of the Geeks on a Plane tour. Here's a little more about Ignite @ PICNIC:

Ignite comes to PICNIC Amsterdam 2009! In partnership with Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Media, we present Ignite@PICNIC - a series of five-minute talks where the audiences takes over the stage. We'll select 10 talks for you to enjoy while relaxing at PICNIC '09.

In times of peril and uncertainty, the creative and innovative minds that emerge as leaders of change. Countless opportunities are emerging for social, cultural, educational and business entrepreneurs to re-engineer our future. What are the challenges we face? What can the PICNIC audience do about them? We'll be looking for some Ignite talks that identify problems and/or provide solutions. If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? Started in 2006 by Brady Forrest, Technology Evangelist for O’Reilly Media, hundreds of Ignite talks have now taken place worldwide. Now, Ignite debuts in Amsterdam at PICNIC ’09. This is your moment to shine!

What's an Ignite talk? Each speaker gets 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, for a total of exactly 5 minutes on stage to talk about whatever lights them up. It's fun, it's fast, and the format forces you to really think about what you want to say.

To do a great Ignite talk, tell us about something you're passionate about, something that others should know, or some unique bit of knowledge or insight that you can impart. And please don't submit a pitch!

Submit your idea today via http://bit.ly/IgnitePicnic

The submission deadline is Friday 11 September. A total of 10-12 talks will be chosen from the ideas submitted. If your talk is selected, we'll need to get your slides before PICNIC '09 (in Powerpoint). Selections will be rolling so submit early.

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