Government 2.5 comes to Washington

Next week, Washington, D.C. will play host to Bob Fine and the Cool Blue Company as they return to the city that started a nineteen-city tour in June. Through the Cool Twitter Conference series, local speakers across the country have joined for one-day events to talk about how they’re using social media to solve local issues. And in D.C., that can only mean one thing: Gov 2.0.

“Gov 2.5,” Mr. Fine corrects.

Government 2.5, as the conference is being dubbed, will bring together minds from the private sector, media, and government to discuss how best to apply social media towards improving service delivery, expand policy debates and manage tax dollars. But according to Mr. Fine, the term 2.5 stems from a growing disdain for the social media vernacular to focus too much on the next-best-thing.

“People are scratching their heads a little bit,” Fine says about the 2.5 moniker, “but I wanted it to get people thinking about using these tools appropriately – it’s not all about next generation.”

Sponsored by the Cool Blue Company, LLC, in association with Cat-Strat Productions, Gov 2.5 will be two-days of conference and collaboration, boasting more than a dozen speakers from around the region. David Molchany, Deputy County Executive of Fairfax County, and Montgomery County Councilmember at-large Nancy Floreen, will talk about how they are engaging their citizens and the Washington Post’s “The Fix,” Chris Cillizza will presumably show those assembled how to tweet like @TheHyperFix.

One of this conference’s differentiators will be the PM programming, dubbed Town Halls. “Town Halls are an opportunity and time for the speaker and audience to sit together and have a higher-level, more in depth conversation about the opportunities for social media in government,” Fine said. “The [Town Hall] topics that emerge in the day will help drive conversations at night.”

The agenda for Monday’s Town Hall (7:00pm-10:00pm) will center around job creation, based on a recent call to action from President Obama to submit ideas on job creation and economic growth, Mr. Fine said.

“They have a formal way to submit ideas through WhiteHouse.gov, so I think we’ll have a lot of interesting things to look at when it comes to social media and job creation.” For example, Mark Stelzner. Founder of jobangels will discuss how Twitter can be used to solve unemployment – “One Person At A Time.”

“The Tuesday Town Hall is more open,” Fine said, “but we plan to look at healthcare and social media. We have a speaker (Phil Baumann, RN & CEO of CareVocate LLC) who will talk on that.”

Other notable speakers include:

• Jonathan Holifield of Trim Tab Leadership
• Kevin Powell, a 2008 Democratic candidate for Congress in New York City, and Author of “Open Letters to America”
• Keynote by Orange County Transportation Authority Manager of Public Communications & Media Relations Ted Nguyen
• Keynote speech from Beverly Macy, CEO of Gravity Summit

For a full rundown of the two-day Gov 2.5 conference, click here.

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