At the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Nancy Scola and I facilitated a session at entitled "Whitehouse.gov 2.0: Upgrading to Open Source Government." We were impressed by the turnout for what was defined as a Core Conversation - essentially a brainstorming session on how to help government achieve broad goals of transparency. The idea behind the meeting was to take what came out of it and produce a report to people in the White House about what was discussed. Nancy and I both felt that this, like Transparency Camp, Government 2.0 Camp and other recent and coming events, are just the beginning of the discussion.

With only one hour at our disposal for the session, we realized it was a tall order to cover this topic, but we couldn't have been happier with the group of nearly 100 people that assembled - from David Almacy, former Online Communications director for Bush to Simple Scott, lead designer for the new whitehouse.gov website, along with people working on USA.gov, the Dept. of HHS, developers for independent open government projects, non-profit social media professionals, participants from the Canadian government, from France and theU.K., and other members of the media who are interested in open government.

After a couple of weeks' deliberation, we've decided to publish what we have in terms of a rough transcript and leave it up for who attended the session to make comments before we submit our report to the administration. We've put that in another post - Transcript from South by Southwest Whitehouse.gov 2.0 Session - and feedback can also be sent to us via twitter to @sairy and @nancyscola. And please continue to use #opengov on Twitter to discuss ideas further.