(Click image to play video above)

What's OpenGovWest?
Part conference, part unconference, OpenGovWest is an open government accelerator and community builder. The idea is to provide a forum for people and government to meet and learn about collaboration, transparency, and participation.

Convened in Portland, Oregon this past weekend, the event was FANTASTIC! And it wasn't just "west" - our people map revealed representation from Florida, New York, Iowa, Nebrask, Brasil, and all over Canada. The knowledge and energy OGWers shared was impressive. Panels on apps competition to culture change to participatory budgeting were highly engaging and loaded with insight.

As an alum of similar conferences and events, I am thrilled that the center of gravity is moving away from "open data" and toward a broader, deeper notion of "open government - the one that first sent chills up my spine in the documentary UsNow. The film is so inspiring that even two years after release, I find myself returning to it whenver I lose my compass.

And the Connection to Workforce Leadership?
First, workforce is a policy area of government. Like other policy areas opening themselves up, workforce too, could learn from and contribute to the body of knowledge and practice emerging around participatory processes. From collaborative budgeting, to on-line debating, voting, and collective problem-solving, new tools are helping governments around the world engage their citizens as never before - and at scale. An amazing collection of videos illustrating these trends is here on the O'Reilly Gov2.0 Expo site.

Second, open processes employ multi-level communications in which people can talk (and collaborate) directly with each other. This creates the possiblity for people to go beyond  influencing government policy to actually designing and delivering solutions to policy problems. People tweeting jobs to each other or sharing leads on LinkedIn are small examples. The myriad of emerging social learning platforms offer the possiblity of more profound change. As for collaboration? In a six-hour Code-a-thon at OpenGovWest, the winning team built an open source app that makes editable and sharebale 211 community service information for Portland and Multnomah County. (Wow.) This is information our workforce centers use every day.

Third, the same technologies making government more participatory, transparent, and collaborative are also changing every workplace and every school in America and across the world. The Future (of Work and Learning) is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.* Workforce leaders have an opportunity to help their firms and workers get ahead of these changes, increasing their competitiveness and ability to navigate a career, not just find a job, and engage in a lifetime of learning, and not just school.

And we're just getting started.

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For more information about OpenGovWest:

• Summary and links to notes & presentations (thank you @nwlinux).
• @JulieG's fantastic observations about why the public sector and private sector need each other.
• The #OGW11 tweetstream.
• Knowledge as Power, the host organization of OpenGovWest, founded by OpenGov Superheroine @SarahSchacht.

*Yes, this is a thinly veiled reference to William Gibson.

Big Changes.

Leaders agree: things are changing. Not just small things, like whether there's a cap on training resources or the timeline for coming board meetings. Big things, like the relationship of citizens to their government and to the institutions they interact with every day: school, work, even family.

Fundamentally, three (interelated) dynamics underlie these changes:

1. Connectivity. As Clay Shirky notes, "More people can say more things to more people than ever before in history." Increasingly, people are moving beyond just talking, they are taking action - action that once required the creation of large organizations and institutions, but no longer does.
2. Innovations in hardware and software. Increased capacity and new devices make it possible to aggregate and manage enormous data sets; better software, much of which sits in "the cloud", makes it easier for people (and not just experts) to organize, understand, use, and share information.
3. Context. We've just experienced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression - and this one was nearly global. Our shared challenges (as Americans, and as global citizens) now stand in stark relief: we need better ways to work together to meet our needs, responsibly, and within our economic means. It's a daunting challenge made more so with each day's headline - 1 in 7 Americans on Food Stamps or Home Foreclosures Slow (because banks can't keep up); or reports from the latest natural disaster. 

But citizens (and not just US citizens) are stepping up to meet these challenges, collaborating in unprecedented ways. They are:

• Organizing camps, clubs, and other community learning events. This is not just about building individual skills and networks, but making communities stronger by experimenting with new models of "infrastructure" (and "infostructure"), creating new kinds of un-institutions, and even new markets and alternative currencies;
• Redefining businesses and busines models; and
• Partnering with each other and with their governments to improve their communities - all over the world.

What Does This Mean for Workforce Leaders?
Workforce leaders confront many serious challenges - unprecedented levels of unemployment, slow job growth, skills mismatches, etc. Typically, workforce programs seek to remedy these ills by delivering services. But what if leaders sought to create spaces (online ad offline) where people could help each other? Surely the wisdom of a crowd whose members are looking for jobs woud benefit the individuals in that crowd.

Similarly, what if workforce leaders made space for people to help each other learn? Basic skills, job skills, even vocational skills - sometime individuals don't need a "credential", mastery of a set of skills will suffice. This is particularly true in emerging industries whose jobs are more difficult to define and describe. What if workforce leaders saw independently-organized unconferences (e.g., jobcamps) and similar events as part of a broader community response to workforce challenges - and promoted and participated in them, too?

And what if workforce leaders thought seriously about how to help people find not just jobs, but "gigs?" With unemployment a stubbornly high 9%, and as many as eight times as many job-seekers as jobs, there are simply too few jobs. While many workforce leaders are engaged on the long-term job creation agenda, far fewer are advancing entrepreneurship, self-employment, or other initiatives that can help people sustain themselves while they build new careers. Only seven states offer a Self-Employment Assistance program that allows individuals to start their own businesses with their unemployment insurance.

And the Video?
The video above is from a recent TransparencyCamp convened in our nation's capital earlier this month. It's a good example of many of these trends coming together. It's a camp-style event in which participants organize and share content with the aim of partnering with government(s) to solve problems. And while it's about open government, it might just say something about what it looks like to lead on workforce issues in the future.

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.

While public officials from President Obama to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal continue to emphasize BP's responsibility for the disaster - and the cost of cleaning it up - Americans expect the US Government to respond. And it does, naming Coast Guard commandant Admiral Thad W. Allen to oversee the federal response, including the efforts of Environmental Protection Agency Admininistrator (and New Orleans native) Lisa Jackson; Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano; Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar; and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Science Administrator Jane Lubchenco, among dozens of state and local agencies and emergency services.

While this event is extraordinary, Government faces many challenges like it - so-called "wicked problems" characterized by their complexity, scope, scale, and resistance to narrow solutions. Unemployment, the credit crisis, climate change, food safety, economic revitalization, the competitiveness agenda - these are difficult issues that citizens expect their Governments to address, even as Government options for managing them are limited.

Why the expectations gap?

Donald Kettl, author of The Next Government of the United States, argues that in the US, this gap stems from the "vending machine" view of Government most citizens hold: the idea that we pay-in (through taxes) and in return, we expect specific solutions (legislation, resources, agencies, regulations, programs, etc.) for which we can hold Government accountable.

This (mechanistic) approach is highly efficient (and appropriate) for simple, predictable, work - processing passports or unemployment claims, for example. When it doesn't work, we 'bang it around' (like the vending machine) by complaining, protesting, or calling our Congressional representatives. But for most of what Government does, this model is not only inappropriate, it's an inaccurate reflection of how actually Government functions.

First, Government services are often aimed at wicked problems and increasingly provided through vast networks of contractors (private for- and not-for-profit organizations) as well through cost-sharing agreements with state and local agencies. This makes many Government services hard to discern on the ground, providing a possible explanation for protest signs like this one:

Second, Government typically sets standards and then relies on the participation of citizens, residents, firms, and communities to meet them, and to report exceptions. The US Food and Drug Administration's approach to food safety is a good example of this. The Government  does not test every vegetable for bacteria before it is shipped to  grocery stores or restaurants (nor could it). But when hazardous bacteria are found and reported, Government establishes bans, announces recalls, and exercises its power to prevent further damage and expose the causal chain.

Third, and increasingly, Government coordinates, even collaborates, with citizens directly to generate ideas and partner on solutions to shared challenges. While new and experimental, social technologies are beginning to reconnect people to Government in ways that set the stage for new models of Government - more transparent, more participatory, more accountable, and sometimes, unexpected, as in this suggested grassroots approach to cleaning up the Gulf oil slick:

This meme, the evolution of Gov2.0 and the remaking Government and public policy, will be a regular topic here at Networked Publics.