HKS Holds Gov. Social Media Camp

Roughly 150 city and state government officials and Harvard graduate students spent their Saturday at the first “Government 2.0” camp to be hosted in Cambridge at Harvard Kennedy School learning to apply current social media tools in local government.

The free day-long camp—billed as an “unconference” where attendees voted on which topics they wanted to present or discuss—featured discussions ranging from “Tweeting like a Pro” to engaging citizens in data-driven case studies.

Much of the discussion at the unconference, which was sponsored by the Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, centered around using the Web for organizing the community and engaging constituents through social media.

The event organizer and Kennedy School student Yasmin S. Fodil said she hoped participants will apply what they learned at the unconference to “explore how government can use technology to be more efficient, collaborative, and transparent.”

Unlike more traditional conferences, the Government 2.0 camp allowed participants to focus on topics that interest them and share their ideas by leading their own sessions, according to the event’s co-organizer Sarah E. Bourne, who is the Mass. government’s chief technology strategist.

“I’ve never been to a conference where you get so much value,” Bourne said.

Bourne added that she hopes a similar participant-driven event in the future would allow attendees to raise “more sophisticated questions” once local government services start using more social media tools.

“It’s a nice benchmark for how use of these tools has matured and integrated into providing government services,” Bourne said of the level of questions raised during such events.

Jeff Blasius, chief technology officer of SeeClickFix.com, an online tool that allows anyone to report and track non-emergency issues, said that he appreciated the flexibility and emphasis on the participant’s needs at the event.

“It was excellent,” Blasius said. “There are a lot of big thinkers here.”

But Jesse L. Weiss, a social media coordinator who led one of the sessions at the camp, said that though the event provided an opportunity to network with peers, the unconference is not necessarily a better alternative to more structured traditional conferences.

“Both have their time and place,” Weiss said.

—Staff writer Rediet T. Abebe can be reached at rtesfaye@college.harvard.edu.