I’m up early this morning to attend the monthly breakfast gathering for AFCEA International’s Bethesda, MD chapter — and it’s a good one this morning. I expect a packed house as Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO and the Office of Management and Budget’s Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology will be speaking on the topic of open government. Along with Kundra are Interior Department CIO Sonny Bhagowalia, Colleen Coggins, who is on assignment to OMB to be the chief enterprise architect, and Energy Department CIO Tom Pyke.
It’s a all-star panel, a very hot topic… and I will be Tweeting (#AFCEA), but I will also be taking my notes. And, in my own way of being transparent, I make those available. So you can see my notes as I take them here. I have started doing this for a few reasons. First, it shares information — and it follows the Defense Department concept of network-centric operations. The DOD concept is you put information out there — unless there is a good reason not to. That doesn’t mean that you don’t continue to do the analysis — tweets are not going to replace a follow up piece that one might write based on theAFCEA Bethesda meeting, to use this example. Nor does it mean that one might take all of Kundra’s presentations to look for themes. But by making that information available — sharing it — it makes all of us better. And we have to understand — and I think people are smart enough to understand — that my notes will not be perfect prose. In fact, they might not even be cohesive thoughts or sentences. But it is more data that people can use to make decisions.
But I have also started posting my notes because I have actually had participants read my notes and tell me that I mis-interpreted what they were trying to say. It led to greater understanding and accuracy later on.