Last week I was the chosen one from MetroStar Systems to attend the Open Government & Innovations Conference [OGI] at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC.  The conference was held on Tuesday, July 21 & Wednesday, July 22, and it was two days of entertaining and quality keynote speeches, presentations, and panels.  The DC Convention Center is a spectacular venue for conferences.  Even though the OGI Conference was held in one section of the convention center, it was still comfortable and there was plenty of room for the 700+ attendees representing Federal, State, and local Governments as well as industry leaders and private sector personalities.

Walter E. Washington Convention Center; photo courtesy of www.dcconvention.com

OGI Mission

As stated by the event organizers, the objective of the conference was to “collaboratively explore how government can use—and is already using—social media tools and social software to achieve President Obama’s call for government transparency, participation, collaboration and innovation.”  It was also an opportunity “to share ideas and case studies about how federal, state and local government can use emerging technologies to create a more efficient and effective government—Government 2.0 by: 1) Collaborating across government agencies; 2) Engaging citizens; and 3) Partnering with industry.”

It is clear that the mission of the OGI conference was achieved.  Over the two days of the conference, attendees experienced excellent keynote speeches, presentations, and discussions about transparency, security, collaboration, and innovation.  It is also clear that OGI’s mission of “using the same social media tools” to present and produce the conference was also a success.  The conference featured an interactive website that let registrants create personal profiles and scheduling, a  public voting system for proposed presentations, separate pages and defined Twitter hashtags for each session, and great post-conference resources via social media.

The Twitter narrative

The OGI organizers integrated Twitter into their event plan by establishing and defining hashtags (i.e. #ogi) for general tweets and unique event tags (i.e. #ogi-105) for each session.  They also suggested adding the event tags to pictures on Flickr and aggregated all postings back to the unique event pages for each session.  In the main room at the event, there were three huge screens around the main stage that featured the #ogi Tweet stream. (Debbie Weil shares some good photos of the OGI stage here).

The OGI Twitter narrative has evolved into some fascinating results and it is changing the way that conferences and the content of the conferences are being digested, shared, and documented.  Ludo Van Vooren (@ludozone) shares OGI twitter stats in his blog post, “Twitter and Open Government and Innovation Conference: Stats and Observations,” while Jonathon Rick shares his opinion on the usefulness of Twitter in “Want to Appreciate Twitter? Live Tweet a Social Media Conference.”  The Twitter plot thickens with Debbie Weil’s commentary “At OGI Conference Live Tweeting Replaces Live Blogging.”

So what to do with the thousands of tweets from the OGI conference?  Well, if you really want, someone has created a 160-page word document of all the tweets. Not quite your style?  Well Dory has an experimentation space where  the OGI tweets are aggregated into Dory’s blog via RSS.  You find that one difficult to read? Well no worries, Pam Broviak has also compiled a series of blog posts that features all of the tweets from OGI.  Finally, if you don’t like reading blogs and like to turn pages, Andrew “God Tweets Me” Krzmarzick, aka KrazyKriz, has come up with the brilliant idea of an OGI Tweetbook, a collaborative project where the tweets were compiled, filtered, and categorized with color and graphics for your easy reading.  All of this is proof that the revolution is being tweeted.

Keynote Speeches, Panels, and resources

There was much more to the conference than just the tweets.  Yes, there were amazing keynote speeches from some Gov 2.0 superstars like Tim O’Reilly, David Weinberger, Aneesh Chopra, and Vivek Kundra.  You can listen to all of these speeches while viewing the slideshows via Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro at the OGI website (just click on each presenter’s picture).  The OGI website also features links to many other presentations, slides, and blogs.

Some more resources I’d like to share are some slideshows from  Session 2-6: Measuring the Impact of Social Media that featured Katie Paine, Liana Li Evans, and Andrew Krzmarzick.  It was a great presentation that discussed objectives, strategies, and different ways to measure social media campaigns.  The presenters were kind enough to share their presentations via Slideshare:

So whether you want your OGI info from blogs, tweets, blogs about tweets, tweets about blogs, Adobe presentations with sound and video, Flickr streams of photos, or slideshows via Slideshare, it’s out there for you and anyone else who may not have been able to attend.  The info and resources are also there for others who may have been there, but were too distracted by Twitter!