Focusing on Federal Employees

[Stephen Buckley]

Dear All,

Last spring, I saw something (it was a graphic) about the composition of attendees at one of the "open-gov" bar-camps in D.C.  (Were there three? TransparencyCamp, Gov20Camp, and ____Camp?)

It was a graphic in the shape of a rectangle, but made up of smaller rectangles of various sizes, each one representing the percentage of attendees from various types of organizations.  For example: Federal govt.; Non-profit; Govt. Contractor; State/Local govt.; etc.

I've tried to (re)find it, but came up empty.  Does anyone else remember seeing it and, if so, do you have a clue about where you might have seen it?

The reason for finding it is that I think it will help us, as a group, to get a better handle on the various groups of people that would be interested in attending the OGD-Unconference.  If I remember properly, the graphic showed that "Federal employees" were a minority of the attendees (maybe around 25 percent).

And if that is true, then I think our planning process should consider that, among the people who would want to attend the OGD-Unconference, the primary "practitioners" of the OGD (i.e., federal employees) might be outnumbered by secondary "supporters" (i.e., all others) by a ratio of 3 to 1.

For example, this could present a problem if we were to use something like IdeaScale (used in Phase 1 of the Open Government Dialogue) for our participants to suggest and "vote-up" the biggest questions that they have about the Open Government Directive (i.e., create a list of "FAQs" about the OGD).

I would think that federal employees (as the primary "practitioners" of the OGD) would probably generate questions different from those generated by "all others".   So we need to make sure that we can differentiate between the needs and desires of federal employees vs. all other participants.

Can that be done with IdeaScale or another product?  I don't know. (But maybe you do.)

Basically, I want to make sure that the OGD-Unconference results in objective information that says "These are the things that federal employees are saying, doing, and asking about the Open Government Directive."

I'm interested in your thoughts about this, as well as any other aspect of planning the OGD-Uncon.  (Also, don't forget to tell us if you know about that bar-camp graphic.) 

vr,
Stephen Buckley
co-manager, OGD-Uncon google-group

[Mark D. Drapeau]

As one of the developers of Gov 2.0 Camp, I can say that we struggled with this. It's very hard to get govies out to a camp on the weekend. Conversely, it's hard to get them out of work to a camp during the week. Basically, it's hard to get decent people with any management authority whatsoever to come for an entire day, especially if it's local because they're tempted by meetings, family, whatever. So you end up with more contractors, etc. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se, but if the goal is to have real Feds, then that should be explicit, and maybe you only open it up to others later - make it a selling point. You should also consider ways that they can listen and participate remotely. So, they sign up on a second registration track ("remote") and then can log in and contribute, but they are vetted. Just some quick thoughts. Oh, and we kept the balance at 50:50 Fed:other by screwing with the registration - when we had too many "other" (as is the tendency) we locked it down for a while and let the Fed group catch up. Mark

--
Mark D. Drapeau, Ph.D.

Bio and links to further information:
http://markdrapeau.com/about

[Mark D. Drapeau]

Oh. We planned the Gov 2.0 Camp with a great guy, Jeffrey Levy. He's the EPA Webmaster and the rep to the Fed Webmanagers Council, and a lot of people listen to him. I'm happy to introduce you if you think it would be helpful to get some "real Fed gov 2.0 advice" -mark

[Steve Ressler]

I agree with Mark.

1) Separate tracks for registration so feds get separate slots.

2) Try to get support from Web Managers Community.  Jeffrey Levy & Sheila Campbell are some of the key folks there.

3) Friday & Saturday is good.  A lot of feds do compressed schedule and get every other Friday off so that helps some.

4) When the Open Gov memo drops, it would help to get at least some support/feedback from folks responsible for the Memo - OSTP Beth Noveck.   

--
Steve Ressler
Founder and President of GovLoop
email - fou...@govloop.com
mobile - (202) 445-0084
twitter - @govloop
govloop - govloop.com/profile/sressler