There’s a very interesting confluence of conversations taking place at the moment on the topic of how technology is changing politics. One is on the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency. Let me see if I can combine the threads. (And sorry, this is a bit of a long post, thanks to all the traveling in DC I did last week.)

The final set of presentations at the Gov 2.0 Expo focused on "Government as a partner." This, hopefully, is where we'll hear about some cutting-edge examples of government opening up to involve citizens as co-creators of better government. (If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that I complained earlier in the day that many of the examples being showcased here today were either of government using social media internally to share information--like the intelligence community's A-Space, the TSA's Idea Factory, or NASA's Spacebook; or government using social media to better inform the public--like EPA's MyEnvironment, or CrimeReports.com; but we hadn't yet heard much about government working as a platform to connect citizens to each other to better solve problems with (or without) government.

As with my previous post about today's gathering, what follows are rough, semi-verbatim notes, along with my first impressions and comments. Unless I've put something in quotes, it's a paraphrase.

Gov 2.0 must mean more than government agencies using social media, said Tim O'Reilly, at the opening of the day-long Gov 2.0 Expo at the DC Convention Center. Some 250-300 people have gathered early this rainy morning to try to figure out what that might involve. While Tim says he's here to learn (and god knows, being a conference organizer means you get to talk to all kinds of interesting people and hear about fascinating and creative projects early on), his opening keynote this morning offered some very useful teachings, and also some hints of what the ideology of Gov 2.0 might be.

As readers of this blog know, I believe people empowered by new communications technologies can make our government more open, participatory and collaborative--and god knows there's a lot of room for improvement over the system we have now. It's great that Tim O'Reilly is focusing his formidable brain and organization to help us think more deeply about these topics. Here are my rushed notes, with comments from me are in italics.

It's rather striking, edifying -- downright breathtaking even -- to see the news late last night and first thing this morning that a State Department employee had reached out to someone at Twitter to suggest that perhaps now wasn't the best time for a service interruption. No, it wasn't that incident itself that was so eye-opening. It was the context-stripped way it has been reported and interpreted. It really was enough to make you think that Barack Obama himself got on his Blackberry to Twitter HQ, declared the service a global resource, and ordered it to stay up and running.

Take the headline from the New York Times, for example: "U.S. Steps Gingerly Into Tumult in Iran." Wow, just wow, considering how Obama has attempted to delicately negotiate what's taking place in Iran. Not surprisingly, given this idea that what had taken place was Uncle Sam himself "stepping" into the mix, Twitter's Biz Stone felt the need to blog that the company was an independent actor, not taking orders from Washington. "It's humbling to think that our two-year old company could be playing such a globally meaningful role that state officials find their way toward highlighting our significance," blogged Stone. "However, it's important to note that the State Department does not have access to our decision making process. "

Of course, Uncle Sam isn't real. Who is real is the State Department official who got in contact with Twitter, a 27-old staffer on the department's Policy Planning team by the name of Jared Cohen. (In a serious blow to assumptions about the Obama-era sea change Cohen's outreach to Twitter represents, he was hired by Condoleezza Rice's State Department under the George W. Bush Administration.) Policy Planning is sort of a cross between a think tank and State's R&D wing, charged with thinking big, new, modern thoughts. If you're a frequent reader, you've read here about how Cohen led an Iraq trip of new media folks to Iraq. Also on that trip: Jack Dorsey, the fellow at Twitter who, according to the Times, Cohen contacted about keeping Twitter up and running. In that in another ways, Cohen is working at the forefront of using technology to create more human-to-human connections in the diplomatic space. And that, of course, is exactly the sort of direct diplomacy he was attempting to facilitate by getting in touch with Dorsey.

But the supremely interesting thing here is what this State-meets-Twitter incident suggests about how unready the system to be to handle government engaging in human-to-human contact. Old framings get reverted to where huge, complex government institutions or even whole governments are anthropomorphized -- "Washington issues stern warning to Tehran," "U.S. calls Twitter..." In theory, there is among many of us close watchers a strong desire for a new era of more open, human, engaged government. In practice, we resort to old ways of thinking that make that engagement too dangerous for all but the most incautious.

Right now, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's blog is in the middle of the second, "Discussion," phase of its unique effort to engage the public online in fleshing out the details of President Obama's Open Government Directive. After a bit of a rocky start, with a flood of semi-disruptive posts from "birthers," the conversation seems to be finding its footing. A new post by Robynn Sturm, titled "Transparency: Open Government Operations," raises some interesting questions and is generating equally stimulating answers. She writes:

As the Obama Administration contemplates new approaches to making government more open, we want to hear from you. What do you – the non-profit fighting in the public interest, the company creating jobs for Americans, the journalist engaged in newsgathering, the teacher of civics, the mother and interested citizen – need to know about the way government works in order to feel more knowledgeable, to be empowered to participate, and to hold government accountable?

Calling all developers: The Sunlight Foundation, Google, O'Reilly Media and Techweb are launching a new contest, Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge, to celebrate the launch of Data.gov today.

The set-up for tomorrow's "Privacy and Analytics on Government Web Sites" event in Washington DC promises a refreshing blend of techno-utopianism and cyber conspiracy thinking. The Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Sunlight Foundation are planning to explore the question of what it means to live in a world where the President of the United States wants to be your Facebook friend and the FBI is reading your tweets. The groups will also be announcing a joint report on how the federal government can properly balance the use of social media with respect for the privacy desires and creepiness tolerance of the American citizenry. RSVPs are requested, and you can do so here.

A while back, techPres contributor Mark Drapeau coined the term "Goverati" -- which, for all its skin-crawling connotations, does capture something about this historical moment. Never, perhaps, since Teddy Roosevelt's civil service reforms has open government been so gosh darn sexy. Cases in point: more than 500 people are registered to spend all weekend at the Government 2.0 "uncamp" in DC. And the Sunlight Foundation announced another round of funding in the form of $4 million from the Omidyar Network.

Are you a local elected official looking for advice from your peers on how to make better use of web technologies to relate to your constituents? Or perhaps you're a government IT specialist looking for support in your battles with footdragging higher-ups? Maybe you're looking for perspective from within the system on how government entities are implementing web 2.0 strategies? Or perhaps you are a not-so-tech-obsessed public-minded public servant who is simply looking for mutual support, across the often silo-ed and stultified world of government work?

You can find all of those things and more at GovLoop.com, an eight-month old social network created by Steve Ressler, a twenty-something federal employee living in Tampa, Flordia. Built on the free Ning.com platform, GovLoop has about 4,000 members at present, and is growing, Ressler says, at the rate of about 1,000 a month, almost entirely by word of mouth. The site is getting about 500 to 1,000 unique visitors a day, and about 150 thousand page views a month. Its members come mainly from all over the U.S., working in local, state and federal government jobs, but also include a smattering of good-government public interest types, academics and what Ressler refers to as "government contractors with good intentions." Plus there's an international contingent from English-speaking countries like Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

I had a nice chat with Ressler late Friday afternoon, and he gave me a full rundown on how GovLoop came to be and where he hopes it will go...

[With the federal government in transition, and high expectations for the Obama Administration to revolutionize how government uses the web and other technology to make its processes more open, interactive and effective, we thought it would be interesting to repost this white paper, which was recently posted online by the Federal Web Managers Council. The council is an interagency group of almost 30 senior web managers from the federal government, that includes web directors from every cabinet-level agency, several independent agencies, and representatives from the judicial and legislative branches. It serves as the steering committee for the Web Content Managers Forum, a group of nearly 1,500 government web managers across the country. These folks are on the front-line of how government uses the web--and as you'll see from what follows, they're chomping at the bit to move forward into the Networked Age. The Editors.]