Image by Kevin Steele via FlickrI attended the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 7 – 8, 2010. This year’s theme was “Opening the Door to Innovation,” and attendees learned about the latest technology and its application and how to break down barriers to adoption. In this blog I will summarize what subject matter presented had an impact on me and made me think. One caveat: any speakers that I do not mention by name or organization are not because they did not influence me, but instead reflect my intention to write a short narrative.
The summit reinforces a trend I am I seeing writ large when I hear discussions about Web 2.0 and cloud. The summit is called Gov 2.0, but I believe it could have been equally called Civic 2.0 as a common theme existed: in providing cost effective and reliable IT solutions to customer requirements, they need to be, good “civic” IT solutions. Civic IT solutions can be measured by their portability across government platforms. The dimensions being used to measure this include openness to standards, security, privacy, number of locations deployed and cost. The conference brought together speakers from multiple organizations— civic commons, Code for America, and ushahidi, to name a few. The speakers shared their stories on how to leverage cognitive surplus and civic duty to develop IT solutions quickly and cost effectively. The consensus among speakers was all problems can be solved at a cost near zero dollars… if you have enough resources. Solutions can also be deployed for near zero dollars if the cloud environment is large enough. Kaggle is an example of a web site that provides a low-cost prize to solve complex problems.
What surprised me is not that challeng.gov exists, but it exists now. The use of prizes as mechanisms to award work in the federal government is an example of thinking outside the box and it will be interesting to see how popular it becomes. I see this as a “foot in the door” for gaming dynamics to become mainstream in IT and not just for gamers (e.g., Farmville, World of Warcraft (WoW)...)—there are many game dynamics that can be leveraged (e.g., the prize is the gaming dynamic of achievement). Communal Discovery is another gaming dynamic where an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a problem or a challenge—two examples are the DARPA balloon challenge and lolcats. The point is the approach does not discriminate whether the problems being solved is serious or not.
Question: Do you know how many game dynamics are documented?
Steve Herrod VMware Chief Technology Officer, spoke how cloud can be disruptive to existing cost models for IT deployments. He discussed VMWare’s VMForce, which is a platform as a service (PaaS.) VMForce, for example, would allow apps to migrate between salesforce.com and Google environments. If this was a government customer this capability would likely require operations and support (O&S) providers and users to think differently about asset management, tier 1 to 3 support, service level agreements and release strategies because apps are allowed to cloud burst (move between environments.) Users are unsympathetic when an app is not working even if it is in the clouds. Governing the movement of apps will be federal, state and local laws, as well as network topologies, depreciation of equipment and skills. While the cloud is a compelling idea/capability, IT will also be charged with providing incremental value to legacy infrastructures on fixed hardware. A key to making this work will be common IT processes for tier 1 to3 support across agencies in a real partnership between suppliers and buyers.
The Gov 2 Summit can best be summarized by comments made by Technorati Top 100 Blogger Kathy Sierra, “We don't need to make a killer app, we need to make a killer user,”
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