Starting My Week with Government and Enterprise

Andy Krzmarzick–who I co-presented a workshop on metrics with at a social media for government conference in Washington, D.C. in March–landed in Boston yesterday in advance of two workshops he leads later today, hosted by the Greater Boston Federal Executive Board.

A senior coordinator with the USDA-affiliated Graduate School, Andy invited me to attend one of the workshops to meet the regional FEB leadership and to entertain the possibility of them working with me in the future to alleviate the cost of flying him up from North Carolina. If nothing else, I can offer insights on the local social media and government communities–and how I am connected to both.

According to the agenda, specific web tools will be introduced and examples will be cited how government is being transformed with blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking sites (GovLoop, Disgover, Facebook, Twitter), video sharing (YouTube, Vimeo), and virtual worlds (Second Life). The intended goal is every participant will be able to walk away and leverage a tool to transform their own agency. If they get confused, they can ask me.

Transforming government with social media is known as Government 2.0 and that is how I will spend Monday afternoon and evening.

After the FEB workshop, Andy will join me at the Boston Bar Association, which is hosting a social media cocktail hour, during which Governor Deval Patrick’s director of new media, Brad Blake, will be among the short list of speakers. I’ve met Brad in the State House several times in recent months, and I look forward to seeing him out of the west wing.

Following wine, cheese, and crackers with lawyers, government officials, and assorted social media folks, Andy and I will rendezvous with Andrea Baker, a DC-based consultant to the U.S. intelligence community–and the rationale for a blog post I wrote last winter about geeks and nerds. I’m guessing other gurus operating in the intersection of social media and government will join us.

Andrea’s in town for Enterprise 2.0, a Techweb-produced event occurring this week at the Westin hotel in South Boston. Similar to Government 2.0, transforming companies with social media is known as Enterprise 2.0 and that’s how I will spend Tuesday and Wednesday.

Conference general manager Steve Wylie spoke to Information Week:

“At Enterprise 2.0, we’re exploring new technologies and how they’re being put to work. Everybody is a social media expert these days. But we’re going to look at social media and distill it.”

Techweb details the distillation:

Enterprise 1.0	Enterprise 2.0
Hierarchy Friction Bureaucracy Inflexibility IT-driven technology / Lack of user control Top down Centralized Teams are in one building / one time zone Silos and boundaries Need to know Information systems are structured and dictated Taxonomies Overly complex Closed/ proprietary standards Scheduled Long time-to-market cycles	Flat Organization Ease of Organization Flow Agility Flexibility User-driven technology Bottom up Distributed Teams are global Fuzzy boundaries, open borders Transparency Information systems are emergent Folksonomies Simple Open On Demand Short time-to-market cycles

My thanks to Steve and his staff for agreeing to my request for a press badge. With an expected attendance of 1,500, I’ll attend a series of panels on Tuesday and Wednesday and will tote my laptop to take notes, write a few real-time blog posts, and do some live-tweeting with the #e2conf hashtag.

Photo/Photoshop credit: Meliza de Castro

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Related posts:

1. Stop Spinning Business and Government
2. Vote to Send Me to SXSW in March 2010
3. Piloting Social Media as an Astronaut

Tagged as: events

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