The first was BarCamp Wellington, where 50-odd people from all parts of the country gave up a Saturday to get together and share ideas and experiences about e-government.

I won’t go in to much detail about BarCamp as other attendees (BarCampers?) have documented the day in detail. For a thorough and thoughtful summation of some of the proceedings, I would recommend Mark Rickerby’s wrap up. There is also a wealth of tagged material distributed all over the web: you can follow the breadcrumbs from the wiki…

The other conference was an SSC event for senior managers from the Australian and New Zealand public services. Called, Driving Government Performance, it was themed around the Development Goals and user-centric design.

The convergence of ideas

As you would expect, the experiences of attending each of these two events were wildly different. The first was borderline anarchic, the second was planned with meticulous precision. One was loose and conversational, the other codified and hierarchical. One was by invitation only (to speak and attend), the other was a free-for-all (literally, I have the t-shirt to prove it).

These two events were poles apart, at least in terms of structure. As far as the content, though, there was not as much divergence as you might have thought; once the rooms were full of warm bodies, the conversations were encouragingly similar.

Highlights from DGP? Steve Hodgkinson gave a great presentation on the impact of Web 2.0 on the government workplace (Looking in the Mirror) where he talked about the shadow workplace of blogs, wikis, RSS etc. Charles Owen’s presentation was a fascinating look at design process, but at 80-odd (dense) slides was a bit like an information mugging.

Conclusions

Ultimately, what I took away from both these days was the conviction that Govt 2.0 is not the El Dorado of the information age, but is something that we are building together brick by brick — and there is a sense of common purpose as to how we design this thing (as we go …sorry Chuck).

What is most encouraging, however, is the sense of energy and resolve to come out of both days. You would expect that the BarCampers would be eagerly looking for opportunities to put some of their talk into action, but the senior managers I talked to were as just as keen to learn, experiment and engage.