The cross-disciplinary smorgasbord that is Gov 2.0 Expo will be held this week in DC. The agenda is packed with nerdy temptations (danah boyd! Anil Dash! Tim Berners-Lee!) but here are my can’t-miss sessions.
Apps for America Contest Winners – Clay Johnson of Sunlight Labs will present the awards. (Check out the submission by hometown and e-patient favorites Regina Holliday and Ted Eytan.)
Open Government Ninja 101: Skills, Strategies, and Stealth – David Hale will tell the inside story of Pillbox, the result of a partnership between the National Library of Medicine and the Food and Drug Administration. (I saw an early prototype at HealthCampDC and resolved to get on Twitter so I could follow David & the others at that meeting — it was that transformative.)
Collaborate, Build, Deploy, Repeat: The Next-Generation Emergency Response Platform – Andy Carvin, Noel Dickover, Patrick Meier, John Crowley, Heather Blanchard, and Walton Smith will explain how online tools can be deployed to help people caught in catastrophic disasters worldwide. (Check out Crisis Commons for a preview.)
An App We Can Trust: Lessons Learned in Post-Katrina New Orleans – Denice Ross will show how her team used U.S. mail delivery data to create an ad hoc neighborhood census so services could be sent where they were needed most. (What are some other unexpected sources of data which might transform health care delivery?)
Healthcare Needs a Redesign – Jay Parkinson, now of The Future Well, will talk about what the government can do with technology to foster change in health and medical care. (Jay always blows people’s minds and I bet this will be no exception.)
How Open Data Can Improve America’s Health – Todd Park, CTO of the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services, will light up the place with his enthusiasm for his topic. (Catch his act – and count the “mojo” references – in this video with Aneesh Chopra. Wait, I mean Aneesh Chopra!)
The Gov 2.0 Expo sounds inspiring. We are especially in learning about the App We Can Trust. We think mobile applications, social media and new technology have great potential to transform health care delivery. We look forward to your updates. We talk about similar topics on our blog and our Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/healthymagination
Thanks so much for stopping by! Definitely follow the #g2e hashtag on Twitter and if you see anything that piques your curiosity, follow up with the presenter. The mood is very collaborative & open at the event.
Update from Day 1 & 2: my personal highlights
The Apps for America health data winner was Forum One Communications’ County Sin Rankings http://is.gd/cp3pq (chlamydia rate – lust; adult obesity – sloth; you get the picture). It was a fun tribute to the County Health Rankings produced by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the U. of Wisconsin. See http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/
Liz Losh knocked my socks off with her 12 Don’ts for Government 2.0, which really could be applied to any organization. Admire them at: http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/2010/05/lightning-round.html
Tim O’Reilly gave a rousing speech in favor of Gov 2.0 as a platform for excellence. Among many topics, he asked how health care could improve the more people use it (the way Google improves) and mentioned pricing transparency as a good outcome of health care transformation. (My response: A call for treatment option transparency is what I’m hearing in my research.)
David Eaves did a lightning-round talk about the power of open data. I mentioned his work in this post, you may recall: http://e-patients.net/archives/2010/05/the-power-of-data-and-the-power-of-one.html
Tim Berners-Lee likened the semantic web to a bag of chips: standard (nutrition) language, universal (UPC) code.
danah boyd gave another stellar talk about how access to data is not enough – information literacy must be improved throughout the population. I hope she uploads her crib notes soon to http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
Kathy Sierra gave a talk about the power of passion that was so convincing that one listener said to me “I could run through a brick wall right now.”
David Hale of the NLM gave a fascinating talk about how collaboration was the essential element to Pillbox’s success. His remarks echoed Tim Berners-Lee’s keynote: Pillbox makes FDA drug data useful by exposing once-obscure ingredients. His slides are available: http://www.slideshare.net/NLM_SIS/open-gov-ninja-101
The first question after David’s talk focused on the possible bad outcomes of giving people access to gov’t data. Drug dealers and party kids could use it, for ex. It was a strong push back against the #opendata zeitgeist and sparked a really interesting conversation among the session attendees. I’ll write more on this later.
Also: How did I miss Miguel Gomez’s AIDS.gov preso in the lineup? That is definitely one for the health geeks.
Watch Tim O’Reilly and other keynoters, already up on YouTube:
http://bit.ly/cg311U
My colleague Aaron Smith & I posted our Gov 2.0 Expo notes here:
http://www.pewinternet.org/Commentary/2010/May/Gov-20.aspx
Of course I’d love to hear what people make of our observations, particularly the Pillbox Q&A: should gov’t hold back data for fear of bad actors ruining it for those with good intentions?
I was planning to go, but something came up. Do you have and document summarizing the events?