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.

Of course, we will talk about Kundra’s presentation this afternoon on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris, but if you want to follow along this morning… the notes are posted here.

On the subject of open government, on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s Daily Debrief Thursday, we’ll also be talking to Lena Trudeau of the National Academy of Public Administration about the “national dialogue” on recovery.gov and transparency. This is the project we told you about earlier where the administration is literally seeking your ideas to one of the most daunting challenges: Bringing transparency to the massive stimulus bill. As I have mentioned, Trudeau has led NAPA’s efforts to use these “national dialogues” as a way of reaching out to people. I spoke about the initiative on DC’s WTOP radio Wednesday — hear that here… And I should also mention that Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller gave us an excellent report from GSA’s IRMCO on this subject. You can hear that here.

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