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In the last 5 years or so “Gov 2.0” (Government 2.0) has grown from being a name coined by William Eggers to now becoming the umbrella term for serious change in Government, and not just here in the United States, but around the world.

Many people, including myself have written much about the term Gov 2.0 – everything from “What is Gov 2.0” to lists of people leading current efforts. Lots of other angles have been covered by both the traditional media and online media.

I focus primarily on people power and how people are at the heart of any Gov 2.0 discussion, whether in print or in person. In fact I have called Gov 2.0 a “good revolution” and as we have all seen in the last few years, this is true regardless of country. I do not mean to state that Gov 2.0 is causing revolutions. Far from it. However, the openness and transparency that Gov 2.0 efforts around the world advocate for; driven by mobility and the cloud – have allowed people to be heard. To hear each other, those people whether in government or civic life, in business or entertainment.

Now thanks to the “Triangle of Gov 2.0″ which is the social media and open computing use; the mobile and device specific tools; and the cloud which facilitates both; we now see individual people gaining access to information and power never seen before in our history in more than one country at a time. Now this is happening in multiple places.

People are driving the change. People are adopting the tools. People are leading the way in forcing governments around the world to be more open and accountable. With this innovation of course comes the other side. The very same tools that can promote openness and transparency can and are in turn used against the people by governments, both democratic and not.

But we are so past the “What is Gov 2.0″ phase that I wrote about in 2010. We have blown past the “look the government is using twitter and facebook” phase. Indeed, we have entered the big data and deep analytical tool phase – complemented by more and more machine readable databases that are continually presenting new and innovative uses and creating new businesses and jobs. But people are still at the heart of the matter. Without courageous leaders willing to stand up to the buffeting forces of politics, budgets and fear; we would not be seeing the deep and dramatic changes we are witnessing unfolding in many countries, and many cities, and localities. People are driving this change, this is the constant in Gov 2.0 since 2007.

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Market maturation comes with ups and downs in any industry. With Government 2.0 we have now reached a point in my opinion, based on being directly involved with part of the transformation; that we are quietly seeing a mashup of Gov 2.0 with cyberwar and digital warfare.

We are in an undeclared cyberwar with multiple countries, a “cyber world war” if you will:
We are in a cyberwar every single moment of every day with multiple countries. This is an undeclared war, a digital free fire zone. It is the space of gauss, flame, stuxnet, duqu; and thousands of other variants in dozens of countries.

How does Government 2.0 play a role in cyberwar?

1. The very openness and transparency is easily exploited against each owner of data, web presences, mobile presence; and can be both quietly or loudly used.

2. More and more countries are using funds devoted to new technology transformations to quietly build cyber armies. China has deployed tens of thousands of hackers in officials positions. Many countries are using their sovereign wealth funds to buy into technology providers who can provide both cyberwar and hacking/stealing technologies.

3. There has been such huge focus on engagement and “listening” that sometimes we forget the huge number of fake accounts and purposeful misleading accounts that exist in cyber space now, let alone social media and mobile social apps.

4. More and more civic and public systems are not only being attacked, but in many cases successfully so now. With the spread of truly dangerous malware like gauss and flame, we will be seeing an increase both domestically and internationally of cyber attacks designed specifically to disable and disrupt.

5. The asymetrical aspect of cyber-warfare when compared to what the U.S. is doing on the ground in Afghanistan as I write this is huge. If in Afghanistan we are concerned with the taliban re-grouping and forming new regional (old) alliances; but we know the tactics and the general terrain. War in cyber space means we are dealing with enemies who instantly can change shape, move time, and can be in 30 places around the globe at once if they are good.

The future battlefields are here upon us; although since it is an undeclared war, the media is not focused on the reality yet. Digital bullets might be replacing real bullets but when whole systems like water, electricity, or transportation go down due to hacking, cyberwar or cyber economic espionage; the effect could be the same.

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I have been following closely the debate surrounding the FDA’s call to regulate apps like you use on your smart phone as a device, like a heart monitor or diabetes test kit.

Is this the right thing to do? I am all for regulation of industries to ensure safety and make sure no one dies because a product was used. But this is a whole new era. Is an app a device? Is it a life-saving tool or is it the new shiny toy on your smart phone about which you know nothing about the reliability or specificity of how it works? This debate has been roiling the device/app/regulated industry market for a long time already, but is really heating up this week due to pending legislation currently being “worked up” in the U.S. House of Representatives.

There are many legitimate questions at stake. Capitalism and how it relates to government regulated industries in a rapidly changing world for one. Health and safety of any “tool” whether device, software, hardware, application or just a bandaid; when it comes to being used on humans? Should the government stifle innovation efforts by regulating apps for your smart phone exactly as a medical device? Are small companies who are the primary developers of most apps still – being shut out of a marketplace controlled by only the largest and most set in place corporations and being assisted through legislative and regulatory ruling? What happens when one of these apps is used in a “cloak operation” and is actually something like a private information/financial information thief?

Wait, what did I just say? The harsh reality is the FDA even admits that the “device approval” is one of the hardest processes they put any company through, outside of actual drug approval. Just ask any device manufacturer about their recent run-ins with the PMA (premarket approval). You will get an earful.

But translate this to medical smart phone apps and the FDA. Who builds apps? As stated above, mostly small companies with small numbers of employees (obviously there are clear exceptions.) If the apps are to be regulated exactly as devices then it subjects these companies to lengthy, even multi-year engagements just to get approval prior to selling anything. This flips the market dynamics of most app companies; that are used to making their money off short development/lead time cycles, and short sales cycles. How can most small companies survive this? They can’t; and back to the question of a stifling of innovation in small businesses through the FDA on behalf of the few companies with the bucks to last out this process.

I would suggest the FDA look at how software and hardware is approved under FIPS for example. (FIPS are requirements issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology that apply to federal government computer systems.) Additionally I would suggest the FDA create a tiered regulatory system, one for devices; one for aps. Clearly this debate is not going away without a fight.

Make it work.

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Gov 2.0 L.A. Hybrid Un-conference

It Was Amazing. Thank you to all who made Gov 2.0 L.A. 2012 a success for the 3rd year in a row. We had over 44,000 people participate in our livestream of the event from at least 19 countries.

A huge Thank You goes out to Callfire, Citysourced, Rockcreek Strategic Marketing, Davenport Institute, TechZulu, for sponsoring and making this event happen.

All of the videos will soon be posted on to our Vimeo Page at http://www.vimeo.com/gov20la and additionally we will be posting the presentations shortly as well.

Enjoy this storify post about the various tweets, photos, blogs, etc coming out of this event.

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Gov 2.0 L.A. Hybrid Un-conference

As the 3rd annual Gov 2.0 L.A. (Gov20LA) approaches on April 21, 2012; I have been thinking a lot about why I started this conference and what it means for you, for me and for our futures. A few years back I wrote this piece “What is Gov20LA All About?”

In the 3 years since we have seen huge growth in social media, cloud computing, mobile technologies and the subsequent explosion of citizen involvement with our governments. This has caused all kinds of situations, good and bad. On the good we are seeing country after country begin to adopt open data and transparent aspects to their internal and external operations. We have seen citizens empowered to use their voice, many for the first time ever. We have witnessed several countries fall to “soft power” of people organizing, and then acting on the organization to effect change of a type we have never seen in our collective human history. On the bad, we are seeing totalitarian governments around the world cling to these new technologies and indeed even the people’s response to them; to crack down, imprison people, kill people and break up organized groups.

I have written in the past about the two headed side of #gov20 and social media in general with regard to Governments and the people who interact with them. This dichotomy is growing, not abating. We see people using technologies to force change yet at same time we are witnessing governments around the world investigate the same technologies to prevent change.

Gov20LA was created to act as a forum to collect the best and brightest people and their ideas and enable them to tell the world their stories. The idea has always been to empower people through learning about the cutting edge applications of technology in government and by the companies servicing them. We feel that by letting you see the speakers in a casual, yet live setting online – we all can learn from the human conversation and dialogue.

Technology is great, solves lots of problems and saves money when properly applied. The problem with most technology conferences and events is they are too jargon laden and usually do not encourage open dialogue with the speakers. We do the opposite. We want the dialogue. We want our speakers interacting both with the live audience in the room and the global Internet TV audience. So we have created an open environment, with some truly amazing people from inside and outside government leading the dialogue.

I am personally so humbled and excited by the continued awesome response Gov20LA receives worldwide. I can’t wait for this year. Join me. Thank you.

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We have some exciting news to share.

Gov 2.0 LA will be shifting the Gov20LA event venue to Pepperdine University in Malibu, California for the 2012 event and for future years as well. We are thrilled to be making this announcement and thrilled to be partnering with a world class academic institution like Pepperdine. In the future, we will be working with some of their policy experts and others to help create a long term vision and support for the ideals and values of open government, transparency and engaged citizens that is espoused by the annual Gov 2.0 L.A. event.

In our 3rd year, Gov 2.0 L.A. has consistently and specifically sought out the world’s leading experts on social media, government and engaged participatory democracy; and we have delivered them to your desktop and on line tv outlets so you can learn with and be engaged with us. We have an incredible line-up of speakers for 2012. It is going to be a very exciting event again, and will be live-streamed onto the Internet as in the past, and we will be fully interactive for questions and input through Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ as well as the chat associated with our live stream.

If you would like to be a “part of” Gov20LA and won’t be able to attend in person, we ask you to help support us through Kickstarter. While we have some corporate sponsors, this event is about empowering you by creating more engaged governments. So help us by empowering us through Kickstarter and thank you for your online participation and support all year round.

Now with the participation of Pepperdine and a stunningly beautiful location (on the coast in Malibu, California) we cannot be more excited for the upcoming April 21, 2012 event and those beyond. We have been blessed with tremendous participation in the past and we look forward to having you engage with our speakers again this year.

Here is Alan W. Silberberg opening the 2011 Gov20LA event.
Alan W. Silberberg introducing Gov 2.0 L.A. 2011

Alan W. Silberberg Opening Remarks Gov 2.0 L.A. 2/12/2011 from Gov20LA on Vimeo.

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Election 2012 was either supposed to be about someone beating Obama or Obama beating someone. That part of the story is still being told. However the sub-story of election 2012 is not which GOP candidate got a “surge”. Surge. That word; each time I heard the word “surge” I looked at my surge protector to see if it was doing its job or not. The sub-story is not who got best played on Saturday Night Live (yet.) The sub-story is not about Superpacs and the unlimited damage they can do to one or all of the candidates without recourse. The sub-story is not even the race to pull the GOP ever rightward and or the race to see how many progressives can once again abandon the democrats. No. those are minor stories.

Indeed the real sub-story; and it is racing to compete with the main story is the fascinating uses of social media, mobile apps and something called Gov 2.0. Many people may not be familiar with Gov 2.0 but with all the current electioneering going on, we need to pause for a moment to see where a lot of this energy and technology is getting its base from. There are some excellent examples of where Gov 2.0 has crossed into electoral politics.

Whether it is fundraising as this article in the Washington Post details; or the increase in people power, and disenfranchised people using their collective voices through social media as this LA Times article details; or simply campaigns using geo-located tools to haul in voters either to the polls or to donate money – it is clear that Election 2012 is really about the technology changes and how it is changing everything from polling to predictive analysis on election nights to fundraising and engagement between elected officials and citizens.

We now have meters that track how many mentions in social media each candidate gets. We have twitter and facebook interaction with debates, and even debates now on Facebook itself.

We even have “election dashboards” found on many websites now like this one on the Huffington Post.

Or this one on Yahoo:

Each campaign has a full suite of social media platforms, tools, mobile applications. Some campaigns are digging deep into “big data” like the Obama campaign is doing in Chicago. Some campaigns are seeing wild success on social media, without even having to pay for it, like Ron Paul is seeing in many states and through his constant facebook, twitter and youtube appeals.

Just like Governments around the world struggling with the changes that Gov 2.0 has brought through social, mobile and cloud deployments, campaigns and election officials are struggling with new technologies; new rules, and in some cases no rules. The parallels between the sometimes exasperating power struggles in Government between those fighting to keep the old way, and those fighting to bring change are quite evident. We have old party officials struggling to make decisions about releasing information into social media channels, just like government officials. We have on the ground campaigns that are each experimenting with new tools and new uses of those tools just like the experimentation going on in and out of governments around the world.

What the Romney campaign does any given day on social media is clearly seen, same for the Obama campaign or the Paul campaign or any other, as social media in electoral politics provides the same kind of transparency (sometimes) that Gov 2.0 does.

What is done behind the scenes with “big data” and analytical crunching will be seen the day after the election; at least the results of whose attempts to utilize data and analytics in combination with social media, mobile and location based services will be seen as we view a winner.

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Our project has just begun, and already positive results are showing themselves with promised funding now being placed into Mozambique’s education system. We look forward to lots of pictures soon of new schools being built to replace pictures like this below.

After just a few months, this week (2nd week of December 2011) there was an announcement in Mozambique’s Parliament about the increase in donor funded grants for the education sector. Suddenly and unexpectedly, this announcement was made by some of the grant making groups to Mozambique about a sudden increase in the amounts being paid on grants already committed to the country.

This is an excellent example of how private diplomacy works, and the “Educate Mozambique” team could not be more thrilled to see our early hard work be translated into such a big early success.
Silberberg Innovations is a leader in just such private diplomacy efforts and see this as an early example of how interactions between Global Governments and financial institutions are adopting to a new way of operating.

We look forward to reading more such stories as the Educate Mozambique project builds and launches more parts in the coming weeks and months. We could not be happier to see promised money coming to Mozambique to help rebuild and strengthen the education system. Educate Mozambique is standing for all the children in need of proper schooling, as well as to help bring accountability and transparency to the international development grant making process.

See this link:
http://www.opais.co.mz/index.php/sociedade/45-sociedade/18110-parceiros-garantem-130-milhoes-de-dolares-para-educacao.html

And the English Translation here:
“For the next year.
This value is equal to that which gave the MoE partners last year.

The cooperation partners of the Ministry of Education pledged yesterday in Maputo, which will give 130 million dollars in this portfolio for next year. This value is used for various education programs, with greater focus on the expansion of the school, especially primary education, and improving the quality of teaching and learning.

The $ 130 million will accrue to the approximately 26 billion meticais the government through the State Budget will allocate to the education sector for the year 2012.

According to Manuel Rego, national director of planning at that ministry, the main focus of the government in the chapter on education is to expand access to primary education.

“Right now, the net enrollment rate of children aged six and seven years of age is around 76%, or 14% of children are still outside the system. In concrete terms, about 200 to 300 000 children who completed six years old this year were outside the system, “explains Manuel Rego, added that for the next year, the government wants 78% of children who will reach age are in the school system, and this time, keep at least 12% off.”

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The third Gov20LA is coming up soon. In fact in On April 21 of 2012 at the same location as this year.

As we have in the last two years, the event will be fully live-streamed and interactive with twitter, facebook, chat.

We are past the point where the “Gov 2.0” in our name does more than evoke recognition. It is time to focus not on the theoretical but on the practical and how that is working or not. This past year the world has witnessed upheaval and change on a scale that is new to all of us. When we did Gov20LA this year - Tunisia had just fallen, and the crisis in Egypt was just erupting in full; we had a collection of the some of the world’s leading thinkers about guess what: social media in times of crisis and governments. It was to be sure pretty amazing timing.

This year we don’t expect any world revolutions while holding the event again, but who knows? We do know that the speaker lineup is getting better everyday. In addition to certain key sponsors we are also going to be crowdsourcing some of the event costs in a way to involve more of the live stream audience in addition to those attending.

The three themes of this upcoming Gov20LA are going to be:

1. Business inside Government and how it is rapidly becoming different, things like SCRM are being deployed and government is basically being forced to restructure itself.

2. Goverments’ use and management of social media in crisis like the earthquake, hurricanes, wildfires and large scale urban fires, and protests and riots.

3. Engagement is now being taken as a for granted thing, “everyone has a facebook page” but how real is it and how are crowd-sourcing and public private partnerships re-arranging the landscape?

We are requesting two things from you.

1. If you would like to submit a panel idea or speak please contact us here.

2. We will be issuing a follow up post before February 1, 2012 with regard to sponsorships and corporate opportunities as well as crowdsourced support for Gov 2.0 L.A. 2012, but if you are interested in sponsoring the event or some part of it, please contact us at Gov20LA@Gmail.com. Once again we appreciate all of the previous sponsors of the past two years, and could not have done it without each and every company and person who stepped up to sponsor the event.

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Change is here. It is happening everywhere. I have been fortunate in the last few months to speak and also do a tremendous amount of listening and asking pertinent questions of minister level officials in 5 national capitals, on 4 continents. The pace of change in government use and implementation of social media, gov 2.0, open gov, egov and various other monikers is extremely rapid, in some countries it is breakneck.

But still the old bogeyman is hanging around. Fear. I have written about the role Fear plays in the gov 2.0 and open gov discussions around the world, but this recent world tour just confirms that fear is still the largest inhibitor to successful implementation of new plans, and actually stops some excellent programs right in their tracks. I have personally witnessed the role fear plays with minister level officials down to low level staffers as well as with political functionaries in multiple countries. I have been in meetings just this year where fear is so palpable in the room; that literally nothing gets done with the exception of voices being raised in anger or out of frustration.

That being said, there are also tremendous advances being made – both those that have been officially sanctioned and budgeted and those where courageous government workers are sticking their necks out to test, take chances and experiment. More and more it is less the top down movements and more the individual workers who are making the real changes. Because a shift in acceptance of a new role; of a new place in the workplace is well underway.

But besides fear, economic concerns are also hitting this movement, both positively and negatively. In USA budgetary crisis are causing ripples up and down the Gov 2.0 movement as it is called here. But at the same time the budget crisis globally is refocusing anew the issue of legacy system investment versus investment in new technologies that are often more cost effective and much more efficient.
So pretty soon we will be crossing the chasm of decision making from supporting older legacy systems and protocols with the need to be competitive on a data basis in an increasingly competitive and real time 24/7 world.

The time to make decisions about abandoning old legacy systems with a sunk investment versus the new-found results and applications available for cheaper alternatives is upon our society, and much like Y2K there is at least partially a ticking clock. This time it is how long will current systems last before not being able to operate in a new world?

In Europe which is also facing severe economic contractions, the funding for these programs is in fact increasing for now, but that may change if the EU financial situation continues to get worse. Additionally, certain European countries need to make a mind shift from cyber space equaling protection of assets versus cyber space being a multilateral space where protections of freedoms are just as important.

Australia is committing funding and new initiatives that will drive the adoption of these practices, including the NBN (national broadband network) which will effectively wire most of the continent to be able to implement egov and open gov quickly.

Canada is struggling with funding issues and a perceived innovation gap – but at the same time it actively encouraging the open gov coalition and just recently announced a new web standards policy and it is clear that there are some powerful ministers and ministries looking to adopt egov and open gov sooner than later.

The UK is getting ready to reveal its next new initiative “GovUK” currently in Alpha, getting ready to be launched in Beta, which will serve a government wide portal along the lines of Govusa, but with a much more direct call to action and a major change in how UK gov websites will be run and maintained in the near coming future.

Russia has a small but extremely active egov movement, and there are surprising strides coming out of Russia, including a gov 2.0 proponent now running for the Duma on an open gov platform. But given Russia’s history of top down management of its people and government, the egov movement in Russia struggles against the state dominated ownership and manipulation of both the media, and the infrastructure necessary to provide open gov, like ISP’s government maintained choking of internet access and the ability to shut off the internet from the people in a very dramatic fashion.

What I have learned mostly though, is that the breakneck pace of change that has been rattling the government and e-government spaces since 2008 is having real results globally. I will leave it to others to pick apart my statements or point to specific case studies. But reality is social, mobile, cloud are here and have forever changed how governments interact with themselves and with us.