Socrata

I’ll be attending Transparency Camp this weekend in Washington DC. It’s yet another way that new media is working its way into government and I’m super excited to take part. It follows the “unconference” user generated conference format popularized by BarCamp. Tim O’Reilly organized the first Foo Camp. Foo Camp begat BarCamp in 2005 and the format has been picking up steam ever since. Unlike conventional conferences which have a preset agenda and identified speakers, bar camps have no preset agenda and no preordained speakers. Sounds odd doesn’t it? What happens instead is that any attendee can nominate a topic by writing the idea up on a whiteboard. Other attendees might do similarly or might “sign up” to participate in one of the topics already suggested. That process goes on for an hour or two and then like a combustion engine, small groups explode into passionate discourse about the various topics. It’s attendee sourced agenda development and attendee driven participation. It’s social media taken to the physical world of conferences.

The success of this format hinges on the participation of the attendees. From the list of people who have signed up already, it looks like there’s going to be some great discussion. Check out just a tiny sample of who’s going to Transparency Camp:

Jon Udell
Leslie Bradshaw
Craig Newmark
Tim O’ Reilly
Chris Messina a.k.a. Factory Joe
Mike Diliberto
Katie Jacobs Stanton
Mark Drapeau
Bev Godwin
Peter Corbett

If you’re going to Transparency Camp I’d love to hear from you. Follow me and send me a message via twitter: http://twitter.com/kmerritt. If you can’t make it and want to follow vicariously via twitter, monitor #tcamp09 and/or follow tcamp09.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.