This month’s Open Government Directive Workshop will take place at the Charles Sumner Museum and Conference Center (17th and M Street NW, Washington, DC).  The workshop will take place from 9am to 4:30pm on February 17th.  RSVP is required by February 9th (instructions are below).

NCDD is a partner of this workshop series, as is the General Services Administration (GSA), the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and GovLoop.  NCDD member Alex Moll will facilitate February’s workshop.

We have a great program planned.  Building off the January 11th workshop at the US Department of Transportation (over 200 people attended the January event; the photo you see is from that event), we are going to transition from divergent thinking to convergent thinking.  This workshop will be focused on creating specific ideas that agencies can drop into their actual open government plans which are due on April 7th.  Some agencies are farther along than others, so this workshop will help spread good ideas from one agency to the next.

This workshop will be different.
This workshop will be highly productive and engaging.  We are using a framework of competitive collaboration to surface the best ideas.  There will be six teams with twenty participants each.  Teams will work in separate spaces for four hours and then a few representatives will present the team’s work to a panel of judges at the end of the workshop.  Judges will be high-ranking thought leaders from the public sector.

How to RSVP
Attending this workshop costs $10 so we can pay for your lunch and coffee.

• If you are interested in participating, first please join this discussion on GovLoop by February 9th, and write 3-5 sentences about who you are, where you work, and what knowledge/experience you’d like to contribute to a team.  If you are not on GovLoop, we encourage you to join (It’s free).  If you do not wish to join GovLoop and would like to participate, please reply to this email with your 3-5 sentences and we’ll publish them to the GovLoop discussion for you.  We want to make this as transparent and easy for you as possible!
• Next, team leaders may invite you to join their team by contacting you through the GovLoop messaging system by February 10th.  Team leaders can focus on one aspect of the OGD (transparency, participation, or collaboration) or team leaders may select a diverse team and choose to cover all three.  Here is the link to team rosters which will be updated daily.
• Online participation– Capacity at the conference center is 120 participants.  Participants who are not selected to be on a team may collaborate online using these Web 2.0 tools.  In order for this to happen, some online team leaders must volunteer to lead.  Anyone can be an online team leader; if you’re interested, please reply to this email by February 10th.
• If you are in the public sector and you are interested in being a team leader or judge at the workshop, please reply to this email by February 4th.

What you can do before the workshop
Whether you will be present or not on February 17th, we would love to have your help in building this list of resources for federal managers who are building their open government plans.  This list will help workshop participants sift through all the useful resources that are already posted across the Web.  Feel free to email your links and documents to or drop them right into this page on the OpenGov Playbook.

Lucas Cioffi
Co-Organizer
Open Government Directive Workshop Series