More Government Employees at IIW Next Time

Issue/Topic: More Government Employees at IIW Next Time (T1E)

Convener: Phil Wolff

Conference: IIW-East September 9-10, 2010 in Washington DC Complete Set of Notes

Notes-taker(s): Phil Wolff

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

iiw-east, iiw.gov, branding, marketing, publicity, outreach

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

We started asking what we could do to bring more government employees into IIW-East. One state employee paid his own way and had to take vacation time to attend IIW.

The first tip was to frame IIW as training. Skill acquisition and development is more reimbursable and easier to fit into budgets.

Timing was problematic this time around. We didn't really benefit from O'Reilly's Gov 2.0 Conference attendees staying for a few more days. Labor Day weekend and Rosh Hashanah are real barriers.

We're not sure if IIW-East is a twice-a-year thing since the pace of government is so slow and the focus is on adopting and applying technology, not on defining it.

We considered the event focus. In a way it is too broad: an IIW narrowed to a specific department (DoD, HHS, etc.), or to a community of interest (like criminal justice) might make a series of internet identity workshops a hotter item.

We discussed promoting the next event by reaching out through the media read/seen by government IT/ID employees. We can share trends, themes, findings from this IIW as news/PR, demonstrating IIW is the place to be.


 * There are many trade publications for defense, healthcare government IT, privacy, security.
 * Dozens of Gov2.0 blogs, like TechPresident and Personal Democracy Forum
 * Cybersecurity mailing lists and other mailing lists
 * GovLoop – a social network

At the state level, we could be reaching out to IT architects. State legislatures in NY and VT are doing some interesting things.

Last, we talked about reaching out to the US Congress. Staffers will attend short briefings on the Hill but not leave for conversations like this. We'd be lucky to get one or two and it might be worthwhile to invite the tech and transparency/accountability –minded.