Washington, DC was first out of the gate in 2008, with Apps for Democracy, the brainchild of Peter Corbett (iStrategyLabs) and Vivek Kundra (then the District's Chief Technology Officer, now our nation's first Chief Information Officer).

Many cities and communities have since embraced similar efforts: New York, San Francisco, and Seattle among them.

This week, in conjunction with OSCON (O'Reilly Open-Source Convention and a programmers' paradise), Portland, Oregon honored its own Civic Apps competition award winners – Sara Sharp, Robb Shecter, John McBride, Andy Wallace, Edwin Knuth, Max Ogden, and Gary Kee.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams emceed the event. Dozens of tech denizens were in attendance, along with venerable OSCON host, Tim O'Reilly.

What the Civic Apps Movement is Really About

It's irresistably exciting – the idea that government could make data available to enable new intelligence, create new services, even spur new businesses that meet the real needs of citizens and residents. But there's also something more profound going on here: we are redefining what it means to govern.

Tim O'Reilly hints at this idea in the video below ("open source is not about what we thought is was about"), and Andy Wallace reinforces it.

Andy built PDXBus because he wanted to use it (apparently, so did a lot of other people, myself included). Before open source (the behavioral code, not the actual code), Andy might have shared the idea with TriMet and a few friends, but it may not have made TriMet's list of top priorities. And then, who knows?

Instead, TriMet made data available that Andy could use to build an application that we could all download onto our phones and never have to stand wondering what to do at a bus stop again.

This is one (tiny) example of a broader and ongoing renegotiation of roles between governments, residents and citizens, and businesses happening all around us.

Cities and communities that experiment with data and information sharing, engage residents in problem-solving, make it easy for diverse people to connect with one another and their government(s), and allow the lessons of small collaborative ventures to influence the larger structures of governing and managing at a mass scale are laying the foundation for gov – and community – 2.0.

And the winner?

It's us.

The depth and breadth of the formal and informal coverage - much of it live - helped bring the conference to the world.

Tim O'Reilly's "Government as a Platform for Greatness" is below, but the entire collection of presentations and interviews is available here.

There is much to inspire:

• Alec Ross (US State Department), spoke to what Secretary of State Clinton calls  bottom up, citizen-centered diplomacy – or 21st Century Statecraft, citing the importance of technology in enabling its very practice not just in this county, but across the globe.
• Andre Blas (Web Citizen) shared "Vote on the Web", a Brazilian effort to engage citizens the practice of democracy and governing by making Congressional voting transparent and comparing it to the (symbolic) voting patterns of citizens by congressional district.
• danah boyd argues that transparency is necessary but not sufficient for generating intelligence or making good policy, using Megan's Law as an example of the kind of complexity transparent data presents.
• Tim Berners-Lee and Alex Howard discuss open data here, which offers a fine prelude Berners-Lee's presentation on why linked data is like a bag of chips.

Media coverage of the event is here.

Alex Howard's "Week in Review" post on Radar provides a through summary of the event.

Dan Taylor boils the event down to three points in his GovLoop "One Perspective" post.

OhMyGov provides a completely subjective list of top 33 tweets from Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3, but the entire  tweet stream is archived here (thanks to August Jackson at @8of12).

A quick peek into any of these links will likely make even a cynic hopeful about where this all heading.