What is written here is a rough account of the session taken from our note taker during South by Southwest, and from this information we will be submitting a report to the White House on recommendations for the future growth of Whitehouse.gov as well as for open government and transparency in general. We appreciate feedback and additions if there's anything we missed in this article that occurred during the conversation.

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After brief introductions and an overview of how the Core Conversation sessions were designed to work, we decided to ask everyone in the audience to say who they were so we could all gather some context before talking. We emphasized the use of #opengov for Twitter to continue the discussion although many are also using #gov20 because of other conferences and such as well. Some of the discussion about the session can also be found under a Twitter search for 'Whitehouse 2.0.' I think one thing that was particularly poignant was that Nancy led a similar session two years ago at SxSW and she said only a dozen people attended. Our room was overflowing this time.

The point behind this session as I first outlined it was to brainstorm ideas for the new administration based on their agenda for increased openness and transparency in government. As Nancy and I prepared, we decided there were 3 questions we wanted answered, although we realized timing would be tough. 1) What do you want coming out of government? (raw data, prepared information, somewhere in between?) 2) What do you want to be able to input into government? (how much do you want gov't to do to connect us together and allow for participation?) and 3) What are you willing to do? (how do you see yourself and others participating?)

Nancy explained that with the Obama campaign, we saw people participate in democracy in greater numbers then ever. She quoted Thomas Jefferson on democracy. "In my opinion, we are getting ourselves to the place we should of been a couple of years ago." Then she asked David Almacy and Simple Scott to each speak about their experiences so far.

David Almacy emphasized the limitations that whitehouse has in terms of what information they can and cannot publish and that much of the technology and contractors are passed on from administration to administration. As Obama has had problems adjusting to the Bush White House, Bush had problems adjusting to the Clinton White House, and so on... He noted that what should be changed at the White House should be changed across all executive agencies and he noted that the role Macon Philips is in as Director of New Media for the White House is actually a level up from what it was under Bush, due to the importance that role played in the Obama campaign and the importance the new administration is placing on new media. Almacy calls Clinton the "first Internet president" since he put up the first whitehouse.gov, Bush the "first digital president" due to his use of regular online content, and Obama the "first social media president."

From here, the notes were fuzzy as to who was speaking when, so for those who read this and know who said what, please feel free to point it out. (We can also put the transcript into a wiki if that's easier and people want to participate there.) Here are some of the comments from the audience as the discussion moved on...

"Don't try to be Facebook. Whitehouse.gov is the only place in the world that represents The White House. The role of government is to provide information, and that information stays online forever."

"We need to build a true government portal."

"Why is the assumption that government should be doing all of this? That may not be the most sensible path."

"Government shouldn't just become droids."

At this point, I jumped in re-asking the first question: what do you want to see out of government? Some people expect all data to be put out on raw form; others prefer regular announcements, releases, information supplied in a prepared format.

A British participant talked about how in the U.K., government data is given to the BBC which then disseminates it. He then explained the FixMyStreet.com project where people can type in their zip codes and enter information about where the street needs to be fixed, as something that's been created to encourage civic engagement in government. This prompted me to ask how many people in the audience have seen the 10 Downing Street site. Over half of the participants raised their hands. The conversation continued.

"Government should facilitate as well."

"Let's go back to the original question of what the government should do for us. There are technical questions of what resources whitehouse.gov should offer and then questions about policies around this. The Obama administration has been progressive, but the technology issues are resource-constrained."

"If people go to whitehouse.gov and expect easy information, they need a civics class first."

"We are talking high-level here. We should empower everyone that works at government to know where to enter and share problems."

Ahh yes, question 3. What can all of us do?

Then the discussion turned to resources. In a panel at the OpenGov Ignite Talks earlier in the day, someone talked about how it would cost millions to get certain kinds of data prepared for external publication. One of the discussion attendees at our session came back at that saying he didn't think we lacked resources, but that we lacked the will.

"We spent billions of dollars on a bailout and we can't do this?"

Here's where the discussion started getting into the details.... there was talk about releasing legislative data as an API, talk about how systems are incredibly out of date in government offices and how they need more than just databases but better work flow, and talk about the need to identify why the rules like GAO requirements exist. Soon, someone pushed back from others in the audience that the open government discussion always gets too technical and needs to be more about how to participate (question 2).

Now for the semantic web. At Transparency Camp, they talked about "win data," data efficiency, and the ease of creating HTML out of data. We talked about risks. We talked about clean vs. dirty data and data sources and the challenges of that. Nancy pointed out, "that's open government."

Here's where one of the Canadians chimed in: "In Canada, there's no policy for releasing data. It's confusing to me how much data is released. Works prepared by the government are half owned by the creator and half owned by Crown copyright." Nancy asked what that meant. Answer: the Queen. "You need to get approval from the Queen's representatives."

Soon thereafter, Tracy Russo jumped in saying that in her perspective as a non-technical person, the conversation was still too focused on data. "The busy mother of three just wants the information - she doesn't care if it's HTML or XML. The federal government manages an obscene amount of information." OK, the next person conceded, then "getting data where it should be is the first step. Getting the data out to nonprofit and private sector to provide real feedback." Another person chimed in: "Make sure all of these high level conversations are taking place on websites that people can actually use." S/he asked, "how do we aggregate? How do we send?" Yes, we admitted, that's a big part of the problem.

Someone else: "One aspect is technology; another is culture. Policy drives culture drives technology." (She wasn't sure if that was the right order, but you get the idea.) "Without policies to become more collaborative, how will it work?" Here, Nancy summarized "government must be participatory and collaborative as a policy."

Then we had one person who believed very strongly that "government should just spit out the data" and "the rest of us should be in charge of how the data is used." I pointed out, though, that sites with .gov at the end are given more legitimacy by the public because they can trust the data came from the government and that the government must provide some sort of information in a readable format if only for that reason.

Next, a question: "When we talk about leadership 2.0, it frightens some in government. How do you deal with that?" Nancy and I then pointed out that there have already been events like Transparency Camp and that Government 2.0 and other events are coming up. Another person pointed out that for those who are not technical, the resistance in government to use the Internet is huge. "They only embrace it because Barack Obama raised so much money. Having young staffers that can infiltrate the organization to communicate" was a recommended strategy. The next person pointed out that politics is really a two year cycle in terms of appointments and positions in government.

Back to moms. "Things moms care about are done on the federal level. On the municipal level, we are chomping at the bit to put up data. We need to create our own portals. Citizens also need to enter data themselves. There are people on all levels looking at the big picture. I pointed out that there are good examples of how data has been made useful like the Apps for Democracy project in Washington, D.C. and the Secretary of State and DMV in California.

Nancy posed the question: "Once you release the data, how do you keep it all up to date?" One member of the discussion: "Data does not speak for itself. Data, like the unemployment rate, is misleading. Before we shove data out there, we need careful thought about how data is originally conceived." A man from the Canadian government then explained that if that is to be done there, it will come at a cost, and these things must be prioritized.

Next, a lawyer who had been standing off to the side, stepped up and said "we have been focused on the executive branch, for obvious reasons... if you look at public access to electronic records for the judicial system, it is primitive and you can be charged 8 cents even for searches that don't bring back any results." He then made a plea for those of us working on these problems to spend 10% of our time on working on judicial data and information sharing problems and implied it could make a huge impact on the legal system.

Another person gave the suggestion to "pair branches of government with community colleges that have interest in collaboration," as a way to cut costs.

"There are lots of open source questions about what government already runs, like voting machines." That one's a big issue, of course, and the group didn't need to spend any time on it - everyone agreed we need more transparency and open source. More back-and-forth ensued about how to build good government programs and how to reach out to people. My suggestion from experience: find one champion within each government organization and reach out to that person.

The last few minutes of the discussion took on a more technical verse around user interfaces. "Entrepreneurs build amazing things." Then the pushback: "usually data has been for a trusted intermediary, like journalists."

If I made one point that I hope people from our session will take to heart, it was to share resources with each other. To my knowledge, there's no one place where all of the open government sites are aggregated into a portal - where sites like opencongress.org and maplight.org can be next to recovery.gov or tweetcongress.org. It's really difficult to keep track of all of the new projects launching because so many are getting built now. (Side note: if no one else does this soon, I'll do it.)

More technical discussion about using a good design framework, like Rails. A third mention of how the "mother of three" fits into all of this. At that point, I had to point out that the new Director of Citizen Outreach in the White House actually is a mother of three, so that perspective should be handled. (It got a good laugh, anyway.)

Then a question: "what do you do about authenticity?" Another person explained that the public sphere will take care of it - people always talk and it comes out whether a business fakes data. But David Almacy pointed out that the White House feeds are being taken and used by others to earn money, and there's nothing they can do about it. Nancy pointed out that businesses are pushing all of this information out, but we don't need all of it. Andre came back to the issue of flow from citizens into government.

We closed the event by talking about getting people to use the #opengov hashtag on Twitter, join the Transparency Camp google group, get involved in organizations and events, and we invited everyone to attend the Personal Democracy Forum conference in June. Then we invited Rob Pierson to speak briefly on behalf of Mike Honda's office and he announced that Congressman Honda is doing an open government project to get feedback on what features and changes constituents want to see on their new website.

Nancy finished with a plug on behalf of the White House - they're hiring new media directors for each executive agency. If you're interested, let us know and we'll send you the information.

Thank you again to all of the participants in the Whitehouse.gov 2.0 session at South by Southwest Interactive. Again, we invite everyone to tell us if we missed anything from this report so we can put it in the final version that we wend to the White House, and we encourage all to use #opengov on Twitter to keep in touch on the topic.

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About the facilitators:
Sarah Granger has been working on digital democracy and related technology policy issues since 1992, including participating on the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery Public Policy Committee and managing projects for organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. She's a Contributing Editor for the Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident.

Nancy Scola is the Associate Editor for the Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident and former staffer for the House Committee on Government Reform where she covered both online communications and technology policy.