Join us on Wednesday, May 12 Thursday, May 13th when we’ll be joined by Marty St. George, the CMO of JetBlue, one of America’s admired brands, for an hour-long discussion on how JetBlue has experimented with and embraced “social-ness.”

Tune in and you’ll hear how JetBlue has integrated 2.0 principles into its business processes and customer experiences as well as undertaken the hard work of orienting its culture towards a more open and innovative mindset. You’ll also learn about:

• How technology is anticipating and enabling a more human (and occasionally messy) culture of collaboration to drive growth
• How the rise and empowerment of the individual doesn’t have to come at the cost of the company
• How embracing transparency, resisting fear, and tolerating failure are critical in today’s dynamic marketplace
• How the design and architecture of new customer service strategies has driven success

The conversation will be hosted by Francois Gossieaux, co-author of the book “The Hyper-Social Organization” due out this summer.

Find out more and register to attend this free event.

There’s one thing that’s clear from yesterday’s Fast Forward webinar with NYTimes.com general manager Denise Warren and Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber: business model innovation is tough stuff.

The publishing industry, as we all know, is wrestling with a world full of change. And they’re trying like mad to incrementally innovate and re-configure their existing capabilities to generate as much sustaining revenue as possible. It was an interesting conversation between Webber and Warren who each tried to tackle the very important question of what’s next? What’s tomorrow’s business model?

There is, of course, no perfect answer. But plenty of potential solution paths and opportunities for monetization were discussed including:

• Re-inventing the reader’s digital experience through a design-driven (as opposed to engineering-driven) approach
• High-value curation that moves beyond raw aggregation
• The rise of social media
• Redefining what business publishers are really in. (Great line from Alan: what biz are we in? if you’re a newspaper and you think you are in the news business then you are dead. It’s a commodity.”)

Thankfully, there’s still a good bit of life left in the subscription and advertising model and as the Times and others evaluate and experiment with new ways to deliver value, new models will emerge. Whether they come from an emerging newcomer or existing player is anyone’s guess.

Thanks to Denise and Alan and our moderator Ed Moran for an informed and insightful webinar.

A reminder to join us at 1 p.m. ET for a conversation with Denise Warren, New York Times’ General Manager and Alan Webber, author of “Rules of Thumb” and co-founder of Fast Company .

The focus of the discussion, moderated by Ed Moran, the director of product innovation for global technology, media and telecommunications at Deloitte: how today’s largest newspaper and magazine publishing companies are innovating to stay relevant (and profitable).

To find out more and register click here.

Below you will find the audio recording of today’s conversation between Jennifer Kavanagh of Oxygen and Greg Clayman of MTV. Moderated by Deloitte’s Ed Moran, the discussion explored how Jennifer and Greg’s respective companies are taking on the challenges of today’s media landscape and innovating new ways of attracting audience, driving revenues and engagement, and putting technology to work in connecting entertainment companies and their assets and advertisers to consumers.

Tune in the recording by hitting the “play” button below or download the recording as a podcast to listen to later.

(We’re also posting all the questions that were asked during the call in the comments field of this post. We apologize to those whose questions we weren’t able to get to.)

A reminder about the next webinar in our ongoing series: “Media and the Money Trail: Connecting with the new Digital Consumer.”

Tune in for a conversation between Greg Clayman, MTV Networks’ Executive VP of Digital Distribution, and Jennifer Kavanagh, Vice President of Digital & New Media for Oxygen, in which they’ll discuss their respective companies’ efforts to develop new models and re-think the economics behind what it means to create and deliver entertainment programming.

Find out more and register here.

On September 29, the FASTforward blog hosted a stellar conversation between Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum.

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?

At the bottom of this post you will see a link to the recording of today’s conversation between Beth Simone Noveck, the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum.

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.

A reminder that tomorrow, September 29, at 1 p.m. EST the FASTforward blog will be hosting “Gov 2.0: The Collaborative Opportunities of Open Government.

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.

We’re excited to announce the next webinar in our ongoing series of discussions with leading thinkers and doers in social computing: “Gov 2.0: The Collaborative Opportunities of Open Government.”

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.

With the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in full swing in Boston, we thought it as good a time as any to let you know about a tweak of focus here at the FASTforward Blog. As you know if you’ve been tuning in to this blog since its launch, its purview has been Enterprise 2.0 in its entirety – ranging from talk of tools and their selection, the first barrier of adoption, to discussion of the cultural issues and challenges around adoption, the second barrier.

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.