Light Reading for Upcoming Gov 2.0 Expo Attendees

With the Gov 2.0 expo coming up soon (May 25-27), I think it is probably a nice idea to share some the blog posts and news stories I've been reading about the subject.


BtoG Communities Now Online - Q&A with Strategic's Marc Hausman
BtoB Magazine (5.10)
As president-CEO of Strategic Communications Group, Marc Hausman works with b-to-b and business-to-government companies on social media strategies. The company, which was founded 15 years ago as a public relations consultancy, began to focus on social media about three years ago. Today, 90% of Strategic’s revenue comes from social media communications. BtoB recently spoke with Hausman about the best ways to use social media for reaching government buyers.

Monster Government Solutions Unleashes Web Site
BtoB Magazine (5.10)
Monster Government Solutions faces a particular challenge in marketing: It wants to deliver a complex, targeted-solutions message about its software and technology, which powers online career communities such as USAjobs.gov—all without diluting Monster Worldwide’s corporate branding and marketing efforts. The answer to that question turned out


5 Ways Government Works Better With Social Media
Alexander Howard, the gov 2.0 writer for O’Reilly Media shares five real world ways government agencies are rolling out social media or networking programs. "The simplest way of describing government 2.0 may be any technology that helps citizens or agencies solve problems, either for individuals or the community, and enables government to operate more efficiently or effectively."

Open Gov Transcends Technology – The Case for Interoperable Business Practices
Stuart McKee, Microsoft State & Local Government National Technology Officer, shares his view that open government should mean more that posting raw data on a website. "Simply put - data alone is meaningless, organize it and it becomes information!"


NHIN Direct: Open Healthcare Records and Government as a Platform
Tim O'Reilly shares his ongoing experiences working with government leaders building an open health care records system. Follow this fascinating passage- it seems obvious that private sector software developers are driving the progress of this program...

I was swept from my meeting with Dr. Blumenthal into a planning meeting for NHIN Direct, an open system for interchange of patient records between physicians (and ultimately patients themselves), where I heard much the same message, which was summarized so eloquently by Dr. John Halamka on his blog yesterday morning:

The NHIN Direct effort philosophy is expressed in design rules

The golden standards rule of "rough consensus, working code" will be applied to this effort.

Discuss disagreements in terms of goals and outcomes, not in terms of specific technical implementations.

The NHIN Direct project will adhere to the following design principles agreed to by the HIT Standards Committee from the feedback provided to the Implementation Workgroup

Keep it simple; think big, but start small; recommend standards as minimal as possible to support the business goal and then build as you go.

Don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”; go for the 80% that everyone can agree on; get everyone to send the basics (medications, problem list, allergies, labs) before focusing on the more obscure.

Keep the implementation cost as low as possible; eliminate any royalties or other expenses associated with the use of standards.

Design for the little guy so that all participants can adopt the standard and not just the best resourced.

Do not try to create a one size fits all standard, it will be too heavy for the simple use cases.

Separate content standards from transmission standards; i.e., if CCD is the html, what is the https?

Create publicly available controlled vocabularies & code sets that are easily accessible / downloadable

Leverage the web for transport whenever possible to decrease complexity & the implementers’ learning curve (“health internet”).

Create Implementation Guides that are human readable, have working examples, and include testing tools.

That should be music to the ears of any Internet developer, and should raise some serious doubts in the minds of any of you who have been swallowing the idea that somehow the Federal government wants to take over the medical system. There's some fresh thinking going on here, influenced by the best practices of open standards and rapid internet development, about how government can use interoperability to stimulate market activity to improve the medical system.

Take a moment and share with me what you have been reading about gov 2.0 and would recommend...