We came, we saw, we ate slightly frightening amounts of Pizza Boli. Transparency Camp '09 happened in Washington DC this weekend. At any given moment, you could step out in the hallway of GW's Media and Public Affairs Building and see a Library of Congress web dude chatting up an advocate for persistent legislative tagging...who's standing next to GSA's web director...who's chatting with Tim O'Reilly...who just finished a conversation with a DHS procurement guru...who spent the morning session brainstorming with the guy who built StimulusWatch...who spent breakfast kibitzing with Recovery.gov's lead architect...who's sneaking away to whiteboard with an open-source advocate...who will spend the afternoon deliberating with the author of Obama's Open Government Directive...who just shared ideas with the new New York Senate CIO...so on and so forth. Sure, for an open-government event, the un-conference snuck under the radar of many people who might have liked to attend. And there's a good chance that you could have counted on two hands the number of John McCain voters in the 300-plus person crowd.

But after two days of brainstorming and back-and-forth, you might be forgiven for looking upon the scene and indulging in some grand thoughts like Craig Newmark's reflection that you were "watch[ing] actual big history being made in real-time" -- or at least signs that a certain transparency-driven model of governing was getting much closer to critical mass. (You Golden Bough fans out there might get a particular kick out of the fact that Transparency Camp kick-off was held in the very same auditorium where the Carville/Novak/Begala/Carlson show Crossfire was filmed.)

I'll point you to roundups and recaps by attendees as they get written, but for now you might like to dip into the Twitter stream. Or, if time is of the essence, check out this tweet word cloud. A Google Group has been established to keep conversations going. And most importantly, here's where you can order commemorative stickers. Next up, in slightly different fashion, is Government 2.0 Camp later this month:

Government 2.0 Camp Pre-Conference Field Guide from Gov 2.0 on Vimeo.

(Photo credit: kenyaoa)