Webcast interview from the Government 2.0 Summit

I’ve been attending the Government 2.0 Summit in Washington this week, along with a lot of friends and colleagues from various spots in Silicon Valley, the international tech world, and federal, state, or local government agencies. If you want to follow along on Twitter, there’s a great number of attendees posting real-time notes and comments throughout the sessions.

Over the past couple of months I’ve participated with many colleagues planning the kick-off Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase, which highlighted fantastic new-technology projects from government agencies across the country. One of the great projects showcased is www.NeighborsforNeighbors.org, a collaborative website of rich services run by Joseph Porcelli (on Twitter he’s @josephporcelli). Among the other services on the site is a webcast series of great interviewst all levels, from across the country. , and this afternoon I sat down for a chat.

You can watch it below, on their site, or over on the archived kyte.tv site  – lots of laughs as we talk about my varied experiences in government, and why Microsoft is focusing intently on enabling enterprise Government 2.0 capabilities.  Fun stuff!

[kyte.tv appKey=MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/202174/553690&tbid=k_168&p=p/s&height=436&width=416]

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Tradecraft in the Long Tail

Fact: Chris Anderson, WIRED editor in chief and author of the Internet-era classic book “The Long Tail,” also runs a couple of Ning social networks focusing on what the intelligence community would call IMINT, or imagery intelligence – specifically DIY Drones, “a site for all things about amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): How-to’s, videos, discussion and more,” and PictEarth, “a Social Network used to collect, link and geotag RC, UAV/UAS or Kite derived Earth imagery for use in 3D Globe Programs including Google Earth, Virtual Earth, World Wind and ArcGIS Explorer.”

Analysis:  With these sites, Chris Anderson is promoting what he calls “Crowdsourced Aerial Imagery.”  In the mission statement for DIY Drones, he writes that “Reasons to make your own UAV range from a fun technical challenge, student contests, aerial photography and mapping (what we call “GeoCrawling”), and scientific sensing. We are primarily interested in civilian, not military, UAV uses here.” (Emphasis is in the original.)

Let’s presume that individual DoD or intelligence-agency personnel have an interest in such issues, and maybe even in spending their personal time by keeping current and following the crowd’s interest in such topics, by participating in these new social networks.  One can then assume that others from foreign intelligence might have some interest in tracking those very IC personnel, by observing their activities within social networks (and not just Ning ones).  No spectacular logic needed for that.

The CIA has had some challenges in understanding their field presence within the Long Tail.