The discussion, which was moderated by Renee Hopkins of Strategy and Innovation, explored how the U.S. government, as well as individual states and municipalities, are employing new tools and processes, as well as addressing cultural issues, to affect change and drive adoption.

We’ve compiled highlights of their conversation into a handy little ebook, available here. You can also access the recording of the discussion here.

And lastly, the audience for this webinar was particularly engaged, tossing out lots of great questions we promised to post as an attachment to this highlights piece when it came out. As regular readers of FASTforward, you likely have responses and perspectives on some of these – feel free to take them up in the comments.

Q: Do you see the direct interaction of citizenry with government circumventing the representative process and shifting more control to the Federal government instead of the states?

Q: How do the non-technical participate in a social media government?

Q: The CIA’s Intellipedia wiki speaks to the issue of transparency within an agency.

Q: We see technology being used in government to offer services, etc. How does local government use this technology to educate its citizenry and encourage civic engagement? Any suggestions or examples?

Q: Will we be making the census data available at no cost in raw form as well?

Q: How does this conversation apply to PACER Court records, which are ideally suited to being made publicly accessible? They are organized, and have no copyright, but for administrative reasons, there are onerous fees to get these documents. There are public projects to make these available, but sadly, the bureaucracy has actually worked to slow these.

Comment: With regard to open government and transparency, it would be useful to communicate to the public (in an easy way, like a graphic) the impact of new state and federal policies, such as the proposed Renewable Electric Standard and the Cap and Trade Program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Too often, the viability or impact is not communicated or lost in a sea of text.

Q: How will the collaboration work for those parts of our country that do not have high speed internet connections in their homes? Will these people be ignored because they cannot readily interact with government?

Q: How does citizen participation solve the extreme polarization evidenced by Fox News/MSNBC? The trend of polarization is getting worse. Does Gov 2.0 make that worse or solve it?

Q: Online collaboration is deeply inviting to manipulation by ideologues. Anyone who has argued politics online knows this very well. So what will the administration’s general policies be to ensure that the processes remain fair across partisan lines?

Q: Where would you see differences in Gov 2.0 use internationally (especially USA / Germany)?

Q: How will people collaborate in specific policy issues when they actually disagree concerning the main points involved in that discussion? Does collaboration in policy-making process work only in consensual issues?

Q: With regard to public participation, I’d like to know what the next milestones are (as we’re going into 2010).

Q: It would seem that government communication and political communication are in conflict here because the elaborate use of data and openness is in opposition to the level of openness preferred by politicians to be able to implement policies. Is this true?

Q: Do you believe than an agency has to be more transparent, collaborative and participative internally in order to be so externally?

Q: Don’t these ideas require government personnel to be open to input and to change their policies and behaviors?

Q: What can an agency administrator do to begin to implement the President’s policy with regard to transparency? What support will the administration provide to such an administrator?

Q: Do you think the NYT article “Athens on the Net” got it wrong by talking of just two views of Gov 2.0: one an Athenian-style direct democracy, where “our consent is gathered every few minutes, not every few years” and the other a false illusion of equality that can be hijacked by well organized groups?

Q: Can either of the presenters speak to what we can learn from other countries on collaborative government?

Q: What are the types and sources of resistance to greater collaboration in governance?

Q: Do interactive methods of obtaining public comment result in different comments being collected? For example, do respondents comment on each other’s feedback, resulting in more synthesized and thought through comments overall?

Q: Can the States work with the federal government to assist in the culture change that Deputy CTO Noveck referred to?

Q: Do you envision a day when multi-stakeholder scenario planning will be available/created with the public to deal with on-going complex public policy issues – such as water management?

Q: What is being discussed assumes a “public” that wants to and is willing to spend time making their contributions in this collaboration. What if there is a large portion of the population who just want to live their lives and not spend time helping in a collaborative democracy? Isn’t this still just a government of the few who care enough to participate – just using social media tools?

Q: Will individual government employees be more accountable with this additional transparency? How will government employees have an appropriate expectation of privacy?

Q: What do you think of a benchmark session in New York with all Open Data Initiatives from other countries like UK, and France?

Q: There seem to be both organizational and local levels for affecting change: The plain language movement was something that seemed to be adopted across agencies, at a higher level, through legislation. We’ve also heard about smaller DIY (or DIO) initiatives like everyblock.com where citizens are taking government data and building a service around it. Do you see these smaller local initiatives as the primary path for improving interaction and service models system wide, or is it a combination?

Q: Citizens send in comments to go that may not be machine readable – is there a budget to fix that?

Q: Will the implementation of Gov 2.0 require legal reform?

Q: During the 1990’s “reinventing government” effort, the White House DID see “e-gov” as including citizens in the decision-making process. How much do the panelists really know about that effort (e.g., lessons learned)?

COMMENT: Aneesh Chopra just answered the question about whether the White House will develop their own “Open Govt. Plan”. (Basically, he said “no”).

Q: The CTO says that the soon-to-be-released “Open Government Directive” will require each federal agency to develop its own “Open Government Plan”. Will the Executive Office of the President (EOP) be EXEMPT from that requirement?

Q: Given the polarization of hot-button issues and the danger of poorly interpreted data (such as climate data) do you think that a consensus mechanism (such as what occurs in wikipedia) is viable?

Q: Data interpretation is a science/art with the potential for misinterpretation; what measures do you envision to keep misinterpretation from occurring from citizen-open-source apps?

Q: Organizing data, AKA knowledge management, is essential to good access, and currently many federal sites are very poorly organized. What types of effectiveness measures do you see implementing to increase usability?

Q: How can we be sure that the underserved, who likely have no access to a computer, are not left out of the new collaborative model?

Q: How do elected officials feel about how this more dispersed approach might diminish or conflict with old-fashioned representative government?

Q: Can the spread of technology create an externality? For instance, how, with widespread and quick-spread nformation can misinformation be corralled or contained?

Q: In regard to the point about engaging employees as we have the public in this discussion, how is whistleblower protection being weighed in post-OGD discussion and analysis? It received the greatest amount of public support (many comments from federal employees directly) in stage three of the OGD, and is fundamental to transparency in any government agency.

Q: What is “WIKI Government”?

Q: Is the CTO office looking to make data natively available on agency websites through the web using Semantic Web of Linked Open Data rather than through data warehouses?

The discussion, which was sponsored by Microsoft and moderated by Renee Hopkins, the editor of Strategy & Innovation, ranged far and wide in discussing how new collaborative technologies are driving a critical cultural and technological shift in the U.S. from closed to open government.

Stay tuned to the FASTforward Blog for the transcript and a highlights piece we’ll be publishing here in the next week or two. And please feel free to chime in in the comments section here with follow-up reactions, thoughts and questions.

The discussion between Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, will be moderated by Renee Hopkins of Strategy & Innovation and explore how a new wave of innovation is changing the way the U.S. government gathers and shares information, provides access, manages risk, enables collaboration, and more.

Find out more and register here.

The conversation, which will be held on September 29 from 1-2 p.m. EST and moderated by the ever-versatile Renee Hopkins, will feature the important work and keen observations of Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and website covering the intersection of politics and technology.

Among the topics to be addressed:

• Transparency: How are government agencies, and those that service them, becoming more transparent.
• Collaboration: What are some of the ways the government can connect people and organizations to the content, issues, and communities they care about and want to improve?
• Technology: New technologies are playing an essential role in bringing the vision of open government to life through new tools and applications. How can organizations capitalize on the vast expansion of opportunity?

Find out more and register here.

While selecting the right tools for the job can certainly prove a barrier to adoption for some organizations, even after they select the right tools they are always faced with the more formidable barrier to adoption – one based on social, cultural and business process issues. How to let people organize themselves in those environments? How to integrate the use of the tools with various business processes and in some cases allow those business processes to transform themselves? How to let go of control and allow some form of self-organization? How to reconcile existing workplace policies with those new virtual environments?

There are many publications and blogs that focus on that first barrier, the tools, and we’re going to leave that to them. Going forward we’ll be single-mindedly focused on the second and the questions above are the critical ones we’ll be focused on. We’ll be telling stories, reporting successes and failures, offering commentary and counsel on what works and what doesn’t, and weighing in on which models or practices should be emulated or avoided. We hope that you’ll take the opportunity to share your learnings with us and and in turn our community of readers, many of whom are wrestling with similar challenges and struggles. Sound like a useful refinement of purpose? As always, we’re interested in your feedback and thoughts.

Scott, as a follow-up:
“The time when it’s easiest to master disruption is the time when sometimes you feel like you don’t need to do it because your core business is doing pretty well.”

Scott, on value:
“When you think about business models it’s important to unpack it and say, ‘What are you doing that’s going to create value? What are you doing that will allow you to deliver value? And how are you going to make sure you capture that value?’”

Vivian, on freeing up their content:
“We want people – we want our users and listeners to look at it and create – to look into our archive, look at our content and figure out other ways to display and to distribute our material so that it reaches the most number of people.”

Scott, on search:
“A good editor is really critical in guiding me somewhere and sometimes I don’t even know what I’m searching for; I need to have some discovery. And again, these two other jobs related to search—the guiding and the discovery—are places where I think today’s solutions still don’t address those areas particularly well.

Scott, on quality:
“[Companies] really have to recognize that quality is a relative term and convenience and simplicity are oftenpen overlooked innovation levers that people can pull to grow businesses and to create new profit streams.”

Vivian, on the need to experiment:
“[You need] to accept going in that you will try something and many of your experiments will fail and that that’s okay… The “stop doing” is very tough for many traditional media organizations and if there is a “stop doing” there is sometimes a reluctance to try again.

Vivian, on audience interaction:
“Our very powerful, engaged, smart, savvy audience is a huge potential for us in terms of the kind of value they create and you will see more and more of that from us in terms of our interaction with our audience. “

Scott, on opportunity:
“There really is a lot of collective wisdom that still isn’t captured. And if you can find ways as a media organization to help facilitate or tap into that collective wisdom and bring some order to it, it’s an area that still is not completely tapped.”

To download the full doc, click here.

Moderated by Renee Hopkins Callahan and sponsored by Microsoft, the discussion touched on topics ranging from:

• the challenges of today’s news business, NPR’s particular “business” and its need to “be its own disruptor”
• the “misalignment” of business models with real value in some of today’s media companies
• the role of technology in enhancing the user experience
• the importance of good editors and harnessing the collective intelligence of informed human beings
• framing disruption as not just a threat, but also as an opportunity
• the viability of charging for content and other forms of monetizing content
• the need to experiment *and* be willing to fail often
• the importance of innovation even, sometimes, in the absence of a clear business model

Click on the link below to access the full recording of the conversation – you can play it in place or download it as a podcast. And stay tuned to this space in the coming days for a trancript of the discussion as well as a highlights piece we’ll be publishing.

Expect a real treat for this conversation between Vivian Schiller, the newish president and CEO of NPR and Scott Anthony, the president of Innosight and the author of the forthcoming book “The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times” from Harvard Business Press. Moderated by Renee Hopkins Callahan, the editor of Strategy & Innovation, the hour-long webinar will explore the many challenges media companies are facing and how they’re navigating through truly disruptive times.

We’re lucky to have two people so qualified to speak to the issues at hand – Vivian was previously the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, and Scott spearheaded the “Newspaper Next” project with the American Press Institute, is a colleague of Clayten Christensen, the renowned innovation thinker and specialist, and is president of the innovation strategy firm Christensen founded.

Find  out more and register today.

Also, if you’re interested in downloading “The Great Disruption” a free chapter of Scott’s book, due out in a few weeks, register here.

Our panelists:
- Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt – the founders of Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation
- Richard(atDell) Binhammer – Social Media and Corporate Reputation Management, Dell.

Click on the link below to access the full recording of the conversation – you can play it in place or download it as a podcast. (Our apologies for the audio issues during the call. You should find the sound in the recording substantially better after the good scrubbing we gave it.)

The discussion, brought to you by Microsoft, the sponsor of the FASTforward Blog, and moderated by David Rogers, the executive director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School, will dig in to how two large and leading companies – Dell and Best Buy – are embedding “social” in customer relationship management, ecommerce, innovation, customer service and other aspects of their businesses, and how social tools and processes are shaping the overall customer experience.

Our panelists:
- Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt – Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation Founders
- Richard(atDell) Binhammer – Social Media and Corporate Reputation Management, Dell.com

Register now to be able to access the discussion later today as well as receive the recording, transcript and highlights later this week.