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.

A few months ago, Governor Schwarzenegger used his Twitter account to request radical ideas for solving California's budget crisis.

This request must have gotten a good response, because the tweet has spawned its own Web site for citizens' policy ideas, with a full set of hash tag standards.

The site was launched on August 25. It aggregates all tweets with the #myidea4CA hashtag into a Digg-style vote up/vote down list of ideas. Like Obama's first virtual town hall, the most popular ideas regard marijuana legalization. (Given the recent high-level attention marijuana policy has received in California, this shouldn't be a surprise--nor should it be discarded as a comical foible of online democracy.)

It is easy to be an armchair critic of government spending. When you're not on the ground, solving budget deficits is simply a matter of "cutting pork": governments spend money left and right! Finding places to save should be easy.