I had a fantastic time yesterday at Gov 2.0 Camp New England and enjoyed the event a lot. In particular I was very impressed by the interest of the public sector. I wouldn’t say it’s typical that an event, held on a Saturday, which happens to be the first nice spring day in Boston, attracts so many government employees, ranging from the governor’s office to local town administrations, and affiliated organizations. Throughout the event you could feel the commitment to work on better and more inclusive governance at all levels.
My personal highlight was the first session I attended, about Open 311. It’s clearly not my core area, but I’m interested in the current development and felt that I learned a lot in that session. One of the most interesting points during the discussion was the evaluation of “Resistat”. Resistat is an initiative to include residents in 311 statistics in Somerville. It works very simple: a mailing-list facilitates communication and statistics and results are sent out to residents as powerpoint files. Not rocket science, but it’s enough communication technology that even though only about 25% of involved residents have been to in-person meetings, 85% of them say that they feel better engaged with their local government (by sending powerpoints to a mailing list, it’s as simple as that!). Anyway, great insights when talking about the “town hall meeting divide”, can’t wait to read the entire study about the program.
Our session about Open Data Strategies was “merged” together with I think 5 other sessions that had the word “data” in the title. Unfortunately it didn’t really work out as we intended it and the discussion went somehow all over the place. Better luck next time I guess.
The last session I picked was all about data visualization. Two young IBM researchers showed and demoed amazing data visualization tools – Many Eyes and sense.us among them. Their latest project, called “IBM Visual Bill explorer”, should make it easy for citizens to visually explore and analyze legal texts. Tremendously valuable when trying to understand or to find potential pitfalls in 1000+ pages documents written by lawyers, as bills usually are.
On a side note: I had absolutely no idea that IBM is running such a great research department. Where are marketing departments when you really need them?
Happy hour – free beer was involved – went straight to talking GIS and Open Source. As it turned out, there are very similar problems across gov agencies (surprising, huh!). One notion during the discussion was, that, instead of throwing money individually at our problems, why not join forces and contribute to and customize Open Source projects where we all benefit from? Interesting thought, will be continued…