I'm in DC this weekend for the Gov2.0 Unconference, a semi-formal get-together to discuss all sorts of topics in the government/politics/technology/transparency milieu: mobile platforms for emergency management; how to engage citizens through social media; technology options for health care reform; digital privacy; tech tools for state legislatures; and on and on.

I'm finding, however, that this conference fit the pattern of most others: the sessions are okay, but they seldom yield any breakthroughs. Instead, the value of the conference comes from the break-time conversations that evolve by having all of these people in the same place. And this time, it is especially interesting given the people that are here...

For the last couple of years, I've thought of myself as working in two disparate communities: one of those communities is "fight the man" technology movements that are trying to make politics cleaner and more responsive to the public. The other community is The Man: governments that have fallen behind the technology curve, and are trying to make their agencies work better by modernizing their IT. For a long time, it seemed as though these two communities were diametrically opposed; that's bad, because the former could help the latter, but instead channel their talent into sheepthrowing.

But over the last two days, I've been convinced that those days are ending. Nothing illustrates this better than my final session: Managing Sensitive Data in a Web 2.0 World. Half of the attendees were from the Intelligence Community. The other half were from transparency advocacy groups that fight government secrecy. These groups' interests are seldom aligned, yet it was one of the most lively sessions of the whole weekend: the intelligence geeks were giving the transparency wonks ideas for platforms that can effectively manage the tangle of overclassified (and illegally classified) data that has arisen in recent years.

I have no brilliant insights about what this means; others might, but I'll have to think about it. For me, the takeaway from this weekend is that the government is now in the company of those that can help them, and geeks have met some customers with problems worth solving.