GTEC Brain Dump

In between my client work and various speaking engagements over the last few weeks I was able to briefly attend a few sessions at GTEC.  GTEC, which stands for Government & Technology is Ottawa’s largest conference on the subject. Over the past few years the focus of the conference has been primarily on Government 2.0 (leveraging web 2.0 to improve service delivery). It was a pleasure to finally see many different stakeholders at the table (not just the techies) from other functions of government including HR, Communications, Policy, etc.. As I always emphasize, web 2.0 adoption and engagement goes way beyond the IT folk in terms of opportunities and implications.

Rather than debriefing the individual sessions I attended, I wanted to share with you my key takeaways and notes overall:

• The federal government has officially launched GCpedia , a wiki open internally to all federal public servants. This has been running as a pilot project for almost a year now among senior federal executives with great success. 
• In a comprehensive study performed jointly by various departments including Agriculture Canada (lead) it was revealed that:
  • 87% of online Canadians feel that government should invest in Web 2.0. The term was explained from an application perspective (blogs, wikis, rss, social networks, etc…) 
  • 57% of respondents claimed that they would have confidence in government blogs versus 7% in personal blogs as a source of information. 
  • There is currently 17% awareness of rss feeds –> Note that this number does not include the vast majority of rss users that have no idea they are using rss (think iGoogle or people that download podcasts). I typically use 40% as my rss stat when these people are accounted for. 
  • You can download the complete survey report here. 
• The United States CIA has launched an internal wiki called Intellipedia that brings together intelligence information from all the various agencies (FBI, CTU, NSA, etc…). The CIA speaker made a great point when he challenged the primarily government based audience to release their data and stop worrying about privacy and security. The benefits far outweigh any risks. His point was that if the CIA can do it, there is no reason GoC departments can’t.
• There was lots of talk on the benefits of using Yammer in an organizational setting. It is essentially a business-only version of Twitter that is limited to people sharing your email domain.
• An interesting initiative has been launched from Washington called Apps for Democracy. Basically, the DC government has released a ton of data and is challenging the public to create mash-ups with it. There is $20,000  of prizes up for grabs.
• A great deal of optimistic discussion also took place at the very senior levels, including a deputy minster panel involving some of the more proactive leaders in government. The overall vibe is that government has finally overcome inertia and is gaining some solid momentum with web 2.0 tools and apps internally. The next step of course will be official external usage, which is occurring on a much smaller scale. That being said, there are numerous pilot projects being run, some of which are enjoying tremendous success (see my Government20 wiki for examples). 
• My favourite quote of the conference “We is smarter than me”.

I know I missed a ton of great sessions, so I’d love to hear about them! What were some of your key take-aways?