"opengov dinner"

kevin: I had a chat with other government stakeholders on how things are evolving (Adobe, CDT, Sunlight...)
... talk on opendata, discussions on business perspective
... on what's the long term impact for industry
... again on the "how" to move from the generic ideas to the practical stuff
... reinforces the points we made on the paper, people read it, found it useful

john: very interesting stuff, how to move from strategy to implemented systems

kevin: also discussion about the dialogue, some points Beth made on the blog post recently

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Wrap-Up-of-the-Open-Government-Brainstorming-Transparency/]

john: one of things one need to do is to engineer processes in the system and get that kind of cultural change
... and that's hard to do

kevin: agree
... creating this lines of business is hard
... sometimes people and power located at different agencies

open data

john: one of the things that interesting me about transparency is how to connect it to public policy outcomes
... e.g. better spending of public money
... one way of achieving transparency is to put up data on the Web
... but then it's the question "so what?"
... what's the next part of journey looks like?
... and that's hard
... what datasets? what for? what's the expected final result?

kevin: great point
... challenge is that some people in charge are technologists
... difficult form them to understand government business

john: agree
... coming from tech perspective myself
... have seen people does not care
... there are bigger challenges

kevin: right, e.g. cloud computing, well, a buzzword
... but what's in it for gov?
... would like to hear more of that

john: someone could say it reduces total cost of ownership and a number of other things
... in terms of OGD reason is because improves some public policy outcomes
... totally different type of thinking
... not about lowering costs
... we tried to highlight some of this in the Note

kevin: I'm glad we did not go very technical there

re-chartering

kevin: working on a draft charter based on previous discussion with Comm and you both
... need to state goals clearly, e.g. need funding
... we might need something about protoyping
... Jose and I discussed a bit about this, and thought of 3 stages
... no money: some smaller thing
...money: a bigger one

john: right, we need a consistent plan

[kevin, tim likely to meet next week]

[some discussion on whether we should have 3 TFs: OGD, Interop, Web Design + Development]

john: I like OGD and WDD, a bit worried about interop
... interop is easy to say, difficult to define, *big* issue
... lots of stuff in there

josema: interop from different POVs
... talked in the past much about front-end, big issue on its own
... back-end is *huge*

kevin: we could focus on the things people have to deliver
... e.g. the data.gov kind of thing

john: I mostly care about OGD, as you know

jose: me mostly, too
... let's try a different approach, what would be the deliverables?

<john> for me, ogd design patterns - likewise, why not web design patterns?

<josema> I very much like that! but how government-specific are those?

kevin: not one big deliverable, small docs, maybe kind of EricP W3C Tech Survey thing
... maybe better two TFs than three

jose: let me see if I get it, we could split interop into two
... some of it goes to TF1, some to TF3, the relevant bits, so no TF2 needed, right?

<john> yes

kevin: right

<josema> finally got it! :)

[kevin to draft charter with two TFs in mind]

[kevin to speak at DAS subcommittee meeting next week]

[ADJOURNED]