Pinging the Best and The Brightest

If Twitter is the new Walter Cronkite, Gov 2.0 is the new Camelot. As the optimism of JFK’s time brought the best and the brightest to Washington DC and Houston (for NASA), the Obama administration’s commitment to opening up government has attracted a large number of technologists to government for really the first time ever.

This is not to say that the tech community hasn’t always been more than willing to sell to government – we always have and always will, but two recent conferences have confirmed to me what others have been predicting would hopefully happen, that not only is the government encouraging innovation from the private sector (or as Anil Dash joked this week “or what everyone else calls the world”), but a growing number of tech stars are putting aside riches or the hope of riches to serve (at least temporarily). At both SuperNova in San Francisco this week and the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in Mountain View a few weeks ago – both a coast away from DC – I and other entrepreneurs got face-to-face time with a wide range of leaders in the federal government.

We didn’t have to go through red tape, get on anyone’s calendar, or for that matter have to fly to DC – they came to us. At the Random Hacks of Kindness, we had the Administrator of FEMA speak to 50 or so crisis mappers for over an hour. At one point, he was wringing his hands saying “we don’t even know the questions to ask”. When the head of FEMA comes to a hacker’s garage in Silicon Valley to plead to the tech community for help, how can we not respond?

At SuperNova last week, it was even more apparent how far this movement (and I use the word movement like I would the Civil Rights Movement, as I think it could be that far reaching and important) has come just in 10 months of this administration. There was Anil Dash (@anildash), first employee of Six Apart and the first head of the new ExpertLabs, up on stage telling companies to get their apps up on Apps.gov which “can reach 2 million Federal employees”. There was Andrew McLaughlin (@mcandrew), the Deputy CTO of the US who left his position as Google’s head of policy earlier this year lamenting that “all the stuff that I can do at a startup for free, I can’t get at the federal government with a $76 billion budget.”

There was Alec Ross (@alecjross), Senior Advisor for Innovation at the State Department – a position created by Hillary Clinton – sitting at the final keynote with Craig Newmark and Jimmy Wales talking together about the future as if this coupling with two of the largest innovators of a free and open Internet with a high level State Department official was the most natural thing in the world. There was Larry Strickland of NTIA saying that the administration was intent on laying fiber networks, and of course NASA was there, obviously very pleased that the rest of the federal government was finally waking up to the benefits of working with the tech community.

Which leads me to my point for this post. As more government data feeds become available and the government continues to become more open, I see two paths that geeks are going to have to face. The first is taking this data and access to build and sell (or give away) solutions that not only can government officials use, but also that will improve the lives of Americans. This first model is what has many companies and entrepreneurs foaming at the mouth.

However, there is a second model that I see, and that SuperNova especially confirmed for me, and that is that technologists will continue leave (or put off) their startup dreams, join the government itself, and build these solutions from the inside. Camelot wasn’t just about passion and expertise at the top, it was about filling positions at all levels of government with dedicated and innovative professionals that wanted to change the world for good, and my hope is that there will continue to be a tech brain drain into the government.

If there is, then I see the potential for this movement to change government for the next hundred years, possibly beyond even the changes the Internet has brought to business. My hope is that this government will continue to offer positions to the tech world, and that we’ll in turn heed the call to service. Here’s pinging the best and the brightest.

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