Tony’s Place

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.