An outsider’s take on Government 2.0 Camp
by Tony Primerano on Mar.29, 2009, under tech
I’ve lived just outside of DC for 16 years now and having never worked for the government, I find it a complete mystery. This is one of the reasons I took a vacation day from work on Friday and spent most of Saturday at Government 2.0 Camp. The other reason? Hope that government will start doing more interesting work in the web space. DC has a growing tech community but most of the interesting work is being done outside of the Federal Government space.
Just drop in on a Tech Cocktail or BarCamp and you’ll find some of DC and Baltimore’s brightest. Peter Corbett helped to bring DC’s old and new tech communities together with the Twin Tech events and Government 2.0 Camp went a step further and brought Government employees into the fold. There are lots of great notes about the event on the Government 2.0 Club site so I won’t repeat them here.
As a Software Engineer I was encouraged by the technology progress many agencies are making but since this wasn’t a tech conference I left feeling a bit unfulfilled. At BarCamp we’re often hacking things together and discussing implementations and APIs. There were several good discussions, but some sessions were more like marketing pitches and others attempted to push certain agendas. I guess this is normal in the government space.
One sad part of this conference was the Saturday attendance. Most unconferences I have attended happened on the weekend. People attend because they were passionate about the topic of the conference. This conference started on a Friday and the government presence on Saturday was greatly diminished. Most of the government people I talked to on Saturday were from out of town. Many locals skipped out since they weren’t on the clock. (see comments regarding strike through) This (The low attendance) left a bad taste in my mouth but we still discussed setting up another conference to help non-profits and agencies that need tech help done for free.
Our Government servants want us to contribute for free. There was even a session on Friday called Getting People to do Stuff for Free. I’m all for giving back, but come on people! Government employees are already stereotyped as lazy, throw us a bone and show up on Saturday next time!
That said there were some great local folks there on Saturday including Macon Phillips and Bev Godwin. We’re all looking forward to more great things coming out of the White House. If you’re looking for any developers ping me. 
Many thanks to Maxine Teller, Peter Corbett, Mark Drapau and Jeffrey Levy for making this conference happen.
March 30th, 2009 on 2:02 am
thx 4 sharing. interesting you have such opinions of govt employees, having never worked in govt nor seen what interesting projects the govt has ongoing these days.
how would you know that all employees are not “on the clock?” did the thought ever occur to you that perhaps some may have been RECALLED to other weekend duties?
As someone who has often worked 12 hour days and on many weekends, i’m offended by your misinformed “stereotypes” and comments. Who do you think you are? i think next time, we’ll opt out of this. we didn’t participate to be bashed…..
March 30th, 2009 on 8:45 am
Hardly a bashing.
Having worked both sides of the fence (some of it with Tony) I can understand what he is trying to say. I also understand why ‘govt employee’ was offended.
I won’t try to to put words in Tony’s mouth, but I will say this. The divide between the govt work culture (particularly in the cleared sectors) and and the commercial work culture (especially in large web firms) is shockingly different. I am not surprised by a low turnout on Saturday from Govt folks. I have seen commercial sector techies (particularly Tony’s team) give a lot of their personal time attending conferences like this. It is a passion for them and even though they are not compensated it is important for them ,personally, to be involved.
I have not seen as much as that intense passion for new edgy technology in govt. I am not saying it does nto happen, in fact it does in some groups, but overall the culture does not seem to drive it.
That’s why I got excited about this barcamp. The govt has lots of driven and intelligent people doing great work, but I couldn’t see it happening because it is hard to find out what IS happening from inside.
I’d say ‘govt employee’ don’t exclude yourself form these conferences. Keep sharing what you are doing it makes a difference.
March 30th, 2009 on 8:55 am
Hi Govt employee,
First of all, I don’t represent this conference so don’t opt out due to my misinformed observations.
I have no doubt that some of the no shows on Saturday were pulled into other weekend work and some others may have taken a vacation day to attend the conference.
I’ve actually applied for a few government jobs in the past few months and I’m hoping that if I land one I will be surrounded by hardworking folks like yourself. It’s the stereotypes that have kept me away in the past but I am hopeful that things are changing.
March 30th, 2009 on 2:24 pm
jeez.. you would think i would pay attention to all the misspellings in my post before publishing it. I think I corrected them all now. It’s funny how our hands can incorrectly learn to spell words that our brain knows.
March 31st, 2009 on 10:59 am
There was definitely a difference in attendance between the first and second days, although most of the government people that I was hanging with on the first day, were also there the second day as well. Instead of just taking a day off, consider the possibility that some of them were actually working because of the close proximity to their place of business.
I’m not officially a federal employee, but I work in a federal environment, as a former fellow, I’ve transitioned to contractor in essentially the same position (fed slots are hard to come by). I’ve worked my share of 12-16 hour days, and regularly work nights and weekends. This is not necessarily encouraged from higher up, I just find that to make things happen in government, someone needs to get the wheels moving.
I didn’t make it to the “getting people to do stuff for free” session. It’s not the greatest title, but crowd-sourcing is underutilized in a government that was founded “by the people, for the people”
April 1st, 2009 on 1:24 pm
Perhaps all groups bailed at the same rate on Saturday, I have no hard evidence to suggest otherwise.
Please strike my statement “Many locals skipped out since they weren’t on the clock.”. The commenters were right to call me out on this as I have no way to know if the real reason people did not attend.
Next time we should have dots on our name tags that indicate what we do. They do this at tech cocktail so you quickly tell who does what.
Red – Developer/Designer/Engineer
Yellow – Entrepreneur/Founder/CEO
Green – VC/Angel
Orange – Marketing/PR
Blue – Blogger Journalist
Obviously there would be different dots for Government Camp. This wouldn’t be a tool to see who bailed, it’s just useful information. Some people only put their names on their name tags.
April 3rd, 2009 on 5:12 pm
It’s truly a shame that you didn’t talk to more government employees. Because I was there both days, and I work for GSA. And I know that many government people were there on Saturday because I saw them – my buds from the Air Force, Coast Guard, Census, EPA, GSA, Mass. State, DHS, State Dept., and HHS. Maybe some people were just late on Saturday? Jeffrey Levy, EPA was there both days, right? Bev Godwin and Macon Phillips were there on Saturday, right? Maybe some government employees couldn’t make it because their children had soccer or baseball games? Are you sure it was only gov’t people who didn’t show up on Saturday?
The sessions that I went to on Saturday were full. And although you didn’t find the sessions useful, many did. You can go to my blog at http://joyrenee.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/gov20camp-wdc/ and see a huge list of bloggers who did find the Gov 2.0 Camp well worth their time.
One gov’t employee I met had to take leave on Friday to come – and I heard that there were others that had to do the same thing. I paid for parking on my own to attend($25 a day X 2 = $50). There are plenty of us super dedicated government employees – and we were there at the Gov 2.0 camp. Are you sure you were at the right place?
April 3rd, 2009 on 7:52 pm
Hi Joy,
I’m pretty sure I was at the right place.
Don’t get me wrong. This was a wonderful conference and I learned a lot. I prefer conferences that are a more technical but I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for this conference. Also, I don’t work in the government space so some of the topics were pretty foreign to me.
I can imagine that government employees got much more out of the conference than I and it sounded like there were some really useful cross agency discussions going on.
I’m no longer going to try do decipher who didn’t show up on Saturday but we can all agree attendance was diminished (The auditorium was less that 1/2 full on Saturday if I remember correctly). Historically unconferences have been held on the weekend but then again they were invented by young techies who have weekends to burn, so maybe next time they should just make this a weekday event to prevent disruption in attendance.
Great things still happened on Saturday but I wish there were more people there.