FCW Insider: Talking collaboration at 1105 Gov Info's Government Leadership Summit

I am down in Williamsburg, Va., for 1105 Government Information Group's Government Leadership Summit, so I'm sorry that I didn't get to post yesterday.

I am pulling together many of the items mentioned during the summit on my Delicious social bookmarking site. Find the items related to the Government Leadership Summit at del.icio.us/cdorobek/2008gls. (If you don't get the idea of what social bookmarking is, there is a wonderful set of online videos created by Common Craft called the Plain English Guides. I mentioned them last year, and you can see them on YouTube, but the video on social bookmarking does a good job of explaining the concept.)

Some items coming out of the sessions yesterday:

* Virtual Alabama doesn't disappoint. Regular readers know I'm a big fan of the Alabama Homeland Security Department's Virtual Alabama program. In fact, we wrote about the program in this week's issue, and I even put the head of Alabama's DHS on the cover of the issue. I always get concerned that I might talk it up too much, but the officials didn't disappoint. They did a remarkable presentation. More on that later.

* Watching for the second government CIO blogger. GSA CIO Casey Coleman announced yesterday that in the coming weeks, she will become the second federal CIO to post to a public blog. We told you back in January that Robert Carey, the Navy Department CIO, was the first government CIO to post to a public blog. (Read it at www.doncio.navy.mil/Blog.) Coleman will apparently be the second. She hosts an internal blog that is available to the GSA CIO team — I, of course, think it would be incredibly transparent and powerful to take THAT blog public, but... the time will come. Coleman is going to be posting to a public blog that will focus on innovation. She is looking for a name. The working title is something like "looking ahead." I moderated a panel on government blogs featuring Coleman; Carey; John Kamensky, a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government; and the remarkable Heath Kern Gibson, editor-in-chief of DipNote, the State Department's blog.

* More on Suda. Volpe's Bob Suda has been to most, if not all, of our summits. As I told you earlier, he announced he is retiring in August, so we took the opportunity to pay homage to a remarkable 30-plus-year government career. As part of that, I asked a few people for comments about Suda, but this one was just so remarkable, it deserves to be shared.