mark-elliott.net

Last week was pretty intense, here was my schedule:

Sunday 26 Apr - New York

After a very cramped 24hr flight I arrived at JFK in New York and while I was tired, I was buzzing with excitement…

Monday 27 Apr - New York

The view out of my hotel window when I woke up (Madison Square Gardens on the right side of the street one block up):

That evening I appeared on Doug Rushkoff’s radio show, Media Squat on WFMU in Jersey City. Here’s a link to a podcast of the show - I appeared in the first half hour or so just before Joanna Harcourt-Smith.

It was fantastic to meet Doug, he is an amazing guy with a good deal of achievements to his name, and on top of that, he’s a very friendly, genuine, passionate and intelligent guy. Unfortunately things moved so fast in the studio that I forgot to get a picture, but I did get a shot of this odd if not tragic sculpture in Jersey City near the studio (NYC in the background).

Tuesday 28 Apr - New York

I had the great fortune to be asked to present at the OpenGovNYC meetup in DUMBO, Brooklyn, and to facilitate a workshop exploring the idea of ‘policy sprint’. It was a really great group and notes were taken in the Sunlightlabs wiki here (thanks Matt and Marquina for scribing!).

Me in action (my presentation on left screen, and Twitter backchannel on right):

Enraptured audience I’m sure :-):

Workshop underway:

My wonderful hosts (Matt Cooper-Rider, Marquina Iliev, Britt Blazer and some other strange guy):

Thanks to Noneck for the tech help!:

Wednesday 29 Apr - Washington DC

This day was fairly stressful, that is until I arrived at the Sunlight Foundation. I caught a train from Penn Station in NYC to Princeton NJ where I rented a car and drove to Washington DC, and due to cockups/delays with picking up the car, I arrived in DC just in time for rush hour with my presentation being at 5:30pm. After finally finding a parking place and bolting headlong up to the offices, I was greeted by a beer, pretzels and a very interested and warm bunch of folks - thanks to Conor Kenny (senior editor for OpenCongress.org) for organising!!!

We explored many of the challenging and subtle nuances of Web-based collaborative consultation and policy generation and once again due to the frenetic pace, I didn’t get any pictures :-(…

Thursday 30 Apr - Princeton University

Thursday I hightailed it back up to Princeton for the conference start in my very comfy rental car:

And I arrived at last:

The conference, City Planning, Civic Participation the Internet at Princeton University launched with a dinner, then a screening of Us Now a good primer documentary about how Web 2.0 is opening up opportunities for the public to self organise and engage with government and governance issues in general.

Friday 1 May - Princeton University

My presentation was first up for the day with a panel discussion following. It was great to get it over with so I could focus all my attention on the many fantastic presentations and folks amassed at what turned out to be a fantastic conference.

Here’s a picture of the panel discussion I sat on with John Geracy from DIYcities and Nick Grossman from The Open Planning Project who also gave fantastic presentations.

Here’s a few highlights from the conference - not all of them, just one’s I happen to get pictures of!

Edward Andersson from Involve that provides:

Adrian Holovaty, founder of EveryBlock and a lead developer of the Django web framework:

Bill Schrier, Chief Technology Officer, Seattle who gave an inspired presentation and made me hopeful for the future of the adoption of innovative technologies for city infrastructure. Robert Davis, siting in the picture, also gave a focused presentation on Toronto’s experience as leaders in social media adoption:

John Wonderlich, Policy Director for the Sunlight Foundation lead a great discussion on and around their many inspiring projects:

Saturday 2 May - Princeton University

Saturday consisted of a few workshops, the first presented a $200 (if I remember correctly) desktop touch screen solution made by bolting a Wii remote control onto a data projector - very cool!

Then Christian Madera the conference organiser led a session on Web tools for planning (well done for putting together such a successful conference Christian!!!):

And then we wrapped things up with a lunch. Here Wansoo Im from Verticles Interactive Maps is showing off his great community history and mapping projects:

Sunday 3 May - Princeton University

Before heading back to Melbourne I even got a chance to do some sight seeing around Princeton University - a beautiful campus indeed! Here’s a few of my ‘moving stills’ inspired by having high definition video on my camera:

Even the student admin building is grand!

I’ve met a lot of amazing people and learned about an equal amount of amazing projects and programs going on in the US. I think this next year with the Personal Democracy Forum and O’Reily’s Gov2.0 conference coming up, 2009 will have set the pace for the open gov race…