ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick has a quick profile of Tim O'Reilly -- publisher, convener, and a man with a plan to bring about an age of "government as a platform." Of late, O'Reilly has been actively working to pull together conversations between government and geeks, particularly of the West Coast variety. It's not as if those conversations were entirely missing from official Washington before. But in just a few short months O'Reilly has helped to create the assumption in both worlds that, to sound like Oprah for a moment, it's okay to talk.

Here's the profile. And here are details on O'Reilly's upcoming Gov 2.0 Summit. (Photo by Adam Tinworth under a Creative Commons license)

I'm attending the Gov 2.0 Summit today and tomorrow, and the program is thick with great speakers and topics. Posting may be in snippets.

Here's my favorite from the first hour. Tom Steinberg, the intrepid guiding force behind Britain's invaluable MySociety group, which makes brilliant, easy-to-use and highly effective sites aimed at improving how government works like FixMyStreet and TheyWorkForYou*, gave us a powerful new way to argue for turning government websites into platforms for civic engagement. I'm paraphrasing slightly:

"If the government said that people can't drive on the roads to go to a rally to protest something, because it would lead to bad press, everyone would protest. Yet when government says that it can't let people using government websites connect to each other, in order to challenge the status quo, no one says anything."

The quirkily eloquent Clay Shirky, described by our Gov 2.0 Summit host Tim O'Reilly as the "Oscar Wilde of the Internet," just wrapped up a quick 10-minute talk during this morning's opening session on the subject of how to make collaborative social software experiments go right. On the "go right" side of the spectrum, Shirky highlighted Washington DC's Apps for Democracy contest. That contest drew in dozens of submissions from developers who created innovative uses of the city's robust data catalog. But sometimes these projects go miserably, horribly badly. Case in point, the L.A. Times' 2005 "wikitorial" experiment, where the paper asked readers to work together to edit an editorial on the Iraq War. The project, boasted about in press release after press release, imploded in on itself, and the paper had to shut it down. In that latter case, what went wrong?

The problem with the L.A. Times wikitorial experiment that Apps for Democracy managed to avoid is, said Shirky, that the social contract between those running the newspaper's experiment and potential collaborators was too articulated, too structured, too direct. The imposing structure that the L.A. Times put into place when they started their project killed any sense of playful experimentation. What's more, when something that had once been collaborative now turns into something transactional, people begin thinking about how to beat the system -- like, said Shirky, how parents fined for picking up their kids late at daycare start to simply pay the fee and leave the kids stewing for a bit.

With those lessons in mind, Shirky highlighted three keys to how government can create successful social software experiments:

• The contract with users has to be complete enough to get users interested, but open-ended enough not to squash that interest.
• The invitation to collaborate must leave room for creativity. Otherwise, said Shirky, users feel like minimum wage workers "without even getting minimum wage."
• And, citing the L.A. Times' PR ramp up in advance of the wikitorials launch, Shirky warned that the more that you take credit for future success in advance, the less likely that success is ever going to happen.

Useful advice as more and more in government try to crack the nut of how to turn citizens into collaborators.

There's was a telling, if all too brief, exchange between Texas Republican Representative John Culberson and the west coast publisher and conference convener Tim O'Reilly at this morning's Gov 2.0 Summit that exposed a fault line that runs through the whole of this "government 2.0" discussion. One wishes that Culberson and O'Reilly had kept up their back-and-forth rather than moving on to less contentious subjects, but it boils down to this: Is this new movement, such as it is, fundamentally an aggressive bid to reform a political system that has devolved into a mess of corruption and exclusion? Or is it instead an apolitical course correction aimed at simply making government more efficient? The answer, if there is one, will like shape what the future of government 2.0 looks like, and whether we'll ever be able to ultimately judge whether it's been a success...