Craig Newmark flew straight to Los Angeles from Dublin in order to share his thoughts on using technology and social media to improve government at the Gov 2.0 Camp LA this past weekend. Newmark, who writes frequently on the topic and has recently been quite active in bringing attention to problems in the Veterens Affairs area, came to speak from a customer service perspective. Although I've seen Craig speak a few times about that, he always adds new anecdotes and provides additional angles on the problem showing how much he thinks about it on a regular basis. But for him, it boils down to the basics. "A lot of customer service is obvious stuff. It's just listening to people." This was the afternoon core conversation on Saturday. (See my earlier post about the conference in general and what transpired the first morning.)

My trip to Gov 2.0 Camp LA commenced with a comedy of errors: lost luggage, a flooded hotel room and flooded streets due to the rains. After a night of little sleep, I arrived at the BlankSpaces co-working location to the company of like-minded people from diverse professional backgrounds but all joining the search for using technology and innovation to improve government. In camp style, we each used the 3 word model to describe why we were there. I thought the focus really centered around engaging new paradigms since people from government, major corporations, start-ups, film industry and media were all together to learn and share ideas.

While there was no shortage of technical expertise present, most of the concepts discussed spoke to a high level of education and interest in the Gov 2.0 space, with sessions ranging from how to properly define gov 2.0 to specific tactics to use in social media within government. The biggest takeaways from the event: focus on people, build replicable solutions, and engage in expansive, multi-pronged outreach and public awareness campaigns.

Those of us on the West Coast - or who stayed up extra late - were able to catch President Obama's town hall live on TV from China along with the accompanying Twitter chatter. There were some amazing nuggets from the town hall. It provided a genuine dialogue with the president, who opened up on his thoughts on everything from terrorism to the open Internet, but much of that will be lost in the Twitter streams the next day or so because Barack Obama admitted (*gasp*) that he has never used Twitter.

Almost three months ago, the City and County of San Francisco launched a site called DataSF where they publish data sets from a variety of city departments for public consumption and application development. The initiative, led by Jay Nath in the Department of Technology, was inspired by President Obama's transparency directive on his first day in office. They then looked at what had been done with Apps for Democracy in Washington, D.C.

A survey released today by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) shows that citizens' views of government websites are moving up to being on par with their opinions of private sector sites for the first time. Measuring 291,000 citizen responses to 104 federal agency websites, the E-Government Satisfaction Index reached 75.2 on a 100 point scale, vs. "e-retail" at 82 and "online news and information" at 74. (It should be noted that offline government came in at 68.9 on the scale.)

Wednesday Aneesh Chopra returned to San Francisco to meet with tech leaders and innovators about where we are re: national technology planning since he's now been CTO for several months. An eternal optimist, he spoke with Tim O'Reilly on the Web 2.0 Summit stage at length about the work ahead, wooing the crowd with his positive energy. But the message is clear: he's dedicated to getting things done in Washington.

Last week, the Silicon Valley technology community enjoyed a visit from the first national Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra. Aneesh spoke at the Computer History Museum for an event put on by the Churchill Club, along with the Center for Democracy and Technology, and TechNet about the promise of innovation in the new administration.

Here's the full video:

Yesterday, in the city by the bay, Netroots Nation hosted an information and idea-packed New Media Summit in part to gather Bay Area locals and also to convene progressive activists in preparation for the Netroots Nation conference coming in August.

The half day program, followed by a party, began with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ended with candidate for CA Attorney General, Kamala Harris, and contained some fascinating panels on different aspects of new media in politics and activism. As always, Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) drew interest from the full house, as did Clara Jeffery (Mother Jones), Karl Frisch (Media Matters), Cheryl Contee (Jack & Jill Politics), Gina Cooper (Netroots Nation founder), and speakers from Digg, Facebook and Ning.

At the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Nancy Scola and I facilitated a session at entitled "Whitehouse.gov 2.0: Upgrading to Open Source Government." We were impressed by the turnout for what was defined as a Core Conversation - essentially a brainstorming session on how to help government achieve broad goals of transparency. The idea behind the meeting was to take what came out of it and produce a report to people in the White House about what was discussed. Nancy and I both felt that this, like Transparency Camp, Government 2.0 Camp and other recent and coming events, are just the beginning of the discussion.

What is written here is a rough account of the session taken from our note taker during South by Southwest, and from this information we will be submitting a report to the White House on recommendations for the future growth of Whitehouse.gov as well as for open government and transparency in general. We appreciate feedback and additions if there's anything we missed in this article that occurred during the conversation.