First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then, as the great Mahatma Gandhi said, what you've been advocating for so passionately suddenly becomes conventional wisdom -- and then you have to finally flesh out just what the heck the transformative social and political change you've been promising is actually going to look like in practice, day in and day out, technocratic detail by technocratic detail, employee manual provision by employee manual provision. Or something like that. It's fairly inarguable at this point that the idea of "Government 2.0" has infiltrated mainstream thinking in Washington, at least. The Gov 2.0 folks have devoted friends in the White House. They have skilled agents in the agencies. But more than other revolutionary change, even, the devil is most assuredly in the details when it comes to the innovative reworking of how government interacts with the people it is elected to represent.

We're still waiting on the White House to provide leadership with the issuing of its Open Government Directive spelling out the Obama vision of open, transparent, and participatory government. (The OGD is coming by the end of the month, sayeth OMB.) And in the absence of trickle-down Gov 2.o from the White House, folks in and out of government are starting to look inward, and beginning to probe two separate but complementary questions: (a) what a future of Gov 2.0 should look like, and (b) the road map for getting from where we are today to that eventual goal. And the role of government lifers and appointees in that conversation is starting to produce some heat...

The reason that you might see technologists and other assorted geeks excited about the Nobel Prize in economics today is that it went to an economist whose work has a lot to say about the Internet age. Indiana Univeristy's Elinor Ostrom focuses her work on how people can go about creating rules for transactions around shared resources, or "commons," that make collective action rewarding (enough) for everyone involved. And where she added a particularly new way of thinking to economics was to zero in on the economic transactions that take place in ad hoc organizations. Her work is part of a body of knowledge that underlies what people are looking for and considering as they design Gov 2.0 systems of participation and new models for democracy, which makes her of particular interest to those of us interested in thinking through a distributed view of the world. Oh, and Ostrom also happens to be the first woman to win the Nobel in economics, so there's that. Details from the Nobel committee are here.

Last week in Washington DC occurred the Open Government and Innovations Conference (OGI), put on by the Department of Defense and the latest in a steady stream of conferences dedicated to the intersection of government, politics, and tech. At least I don't think there have been any new Gov 2.0 conference between last Wednesday and today. It's frankly hard to keep track these days, what with Politics Online, our own Personal Democracy Forum, the upcoming Gov 2.0 Summit, so on and so forth. In what was once a wasteland, there is today rich bounty.

And as the gov 2.0 movement grows, it only makes sense that it splinter into different segments. Well, not exactly splinter, but pool in places. An in-house web manager at a behemoth government agency is going to have a different set of needs and wants than an entrepreneurial "new media" consultant. Both their interests are different from those of a grassroots activist looking for new organizing tactics. We see something similar happening in the food movement. As foodie-ism goes mainstream, we're crossing over from a general agreement that "Good food's important!" to "Okay, you folks think about food safety and we'll think about food justice and you think about changing food culture." That's a sign of maturation. It also means that the days of one-size-fits-all open government are over and done.

Here's an example. One staffer from a small federal office posted her reflections on OGI over on GovLoop, the open social network. She had mixed feelings about the conference, she wrote. "All web 2.0 conferences are all starting to look exactly the same. Many speakers come from agencies that are boldly using social media in a new and exciting ways, and many more 'believers,' who are not allowed to use those same technologies, come to hear about it." In other words, there are haves and have-nots when it comes to open government. "NASA and DoD get to successfully use social media, and the rest of us, for the most part, don't." And for the have-nots, she writes, what they need is less cheerleading and more tactical training. "We need specifics: case studies, business case strategies that succeeded to support any/all of these tools, etc." It's worth joining GovLoop to read the whole thing.

Via NextGov, the Department of Defense has launched a new online campaign aimed at destigmatizing the mental health struggles for active duty and reservist soldiers. RealWarriors.net frames psychological wounds -- including those stemming from traumatic brain injury -- as part and parcel of the battlefield challenges facing service members. The site features web video profiles of military members who have fought and overcome mental challenges, and gone on to continue their careers. One clip features a Marine dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In it, his commanding officer and family members praise his strength while discussing in honest terms his psychological battles since returning from war. He's now, says the clip, an intelligence officer. (Notice the .net domain, which might appear a bit less imposing to service members seeking help than a .gov address.)

The parade of Gov 2.0 conferences continues, with this weekend's eDemocracyCamp, timed to take place just before the start of IPDI's Politics Online conference. eDC is actually in its second year, and it will run from 8am to 5pm on Sunday at George Washington University's (go Colonials!) Media and Public Affairs Building. That's the same space the recent Transparency Camp took place. Importantly, happy hour will take place at the end of the day at McFadden's. As a bar camp, attendance is free. You can register and check out who else is scheduled to attend here.

If the RSVPs are to be believed, right now about 500 people our so are gathered at Washington DC's Duke Ellington School of the Arts for Government Camp 2.0 -- part of what seems to be the exploding field of applying web 2.0 thinking to the nuts and bolts of American government. We're in the early days of the marriage. The agenda-free "unconference" format, for example, is old hat in the tech world but rather new in government circles; reads the wiki: "There is no 'right' way of doing this. We're all figuring this out as we create it together." The event is actually the first major flag planting of the "Government 2.0 Club," which you can read all about here. In short, the idea is to "bring together leading thinkers from government, academia and industry to share ideas and solutions for leveraging social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more collaborate, efficient and effective government." If you're not in DC for the gathering, perhaps the best way to play along is to dive into the rapidly-flowing Twitter stream. A warning, though: you'll be asked to decipher such tweets as, "SUPER discussions about A-space & open source dev model changes vis a vis #forge.mil." Exactly.