“How about we both move to DC and get involved in this scene and start pushing?”

Ahh youthful enthusiasm. They have my number (and yours too I'm assuming) but life goes on – I'm pretty much booked out for at least the next few months and am currently focusing on a new small biz… I've said in the past that if called, I'd serve, but honestly, unless it was something that was directly impactful and where I'd have the resources and influence to be able execute, it'd probably be a waste of time and energy.

I don't think you could be that effective pushing an agenda (externally or internally) that doesn't want to be pushed, but I'm working under the assumption that whether it's Kundra or someone else (but particularly if it's Kundra) as CTO, that they'll “get it” and be able to tap into some pretty excited people at the OMB (E-Gov) or GSA (USA.gov) — see, I don't even know anything about the federal level bureaucracy (they have semi-regular pow-wows apparently, but I wouldn't exactly call it a “scene”).

Who knows, maybe the WH web team has some expertise in building and scaling complex social web apps, but regardless if they opened up a new high-profile project like a version of the Briefing Book, I suspect they'd get help from a lot of people and make a lot more progress. Even if I might not drop everything to go work on it, I'd do something like write some data exporter scripts for them, which probably wouldn't take more than an hour or two to do. After I (or any third party, which is the important thing) were motivated, could write all kinds of term-extraction and relatedness algorithms on the textual content or relatedness/recommendations based on user votes…

Of course, there's a lot of infrastructure and cat wrangling involved in fostering a working community for that sort of thing, and while there are challenges in striking the right tone and making it really effective, I think the bar is set pretty low at the moment.

“How about we both move to DC and get involved in this scene and start pushing?”

Ahh youthful enthusiasm. They have my number (and yours too I'm assuming) but life goes on – I'm pretty much booked out for at least the next few months and am currently focusing on a new small biz… I've said in the past that if called, I'd serve, but honestly, unless it was something that was directly impactful and where I'd have the resources and influence to be able execute, it'd probably be a waste of time and energy.

I don't think you could be that effective pushing an agenda (externally or internally) that doesn't want to be pushed, but I'm working under the assumption that whether it's Kundra or someone else (but particularly if it's Kundra) as CTO, that they'll “get it” and be able to tap into some pretty excited people at the OMB (E-Gov) or GSA (USA.gov) — see, I don't even know anything about the federal level bureaucracy (they have semi-regular pow-wows apparently, but I wouldn't exactly call it a “scene”).

Who knows, maybe the WH web team has some expertise in building and scaling complex social web apps, but regardless if they opened up a new high-profile project like a version of the Briefing Book, I suspect they'd get help from a lot of people and make a lot more progress. Even if I might not drop everything to go work on it, I'd do something like write some data exporter scripts for them, which probably wouldn't take more than an hour or two to do. After I (or any third party, which is the important thing) were motivated, could write all kinds of term-extraction and relatedness algorithms on the textual content or relatedness/recommendations based on user votes…

Of course, there's a lot of infrastructure and cat wrangling involved in fostering a working community for that sort of thing, and while there are challenges in striking the right tone and making it really effective, I think the bar is set pretty low at the moment.

“How about we both move to DC and get involved in this scene and start pushing?”

Ahh youthful enthusiasm. I dropped a line so they have my number (and yours too I'm assuming) but life goes on – I'm pretty much booked out for at least the next few months and am currently focusing on a new small biz…

That being said, I'm working under the assumption that whether it's Kundra or someone else (but particularly if it's Kundra) as CTO, that they'll “get it” and be able to tap into some pretty excited people at the OMB (E-Gov) or GSA (USA.gov) — see, I don't even know anything about the federal level bureaucracy (they have semi-regular pow-wows apparently, but I wouldn't exactly call it a “scene”).

Who knows, maybe the WH web team has some expertise in building and scaling complex social web apps, but regardless if they opened up a new high-profile project like a version of the Change Book, I suspect they'd get help from a lot of people and make a lot more progress. Even if I might not drop everything to go work on it, I'd do something like write some data exporter scripts for them, which probably wouldn't take more than an hour or two to do. After I (or any third party, which is the important thing) were motivated, could write all kinds of term-extraction and relatedness algorithms on the textual content or relatedness/recommendations based on user votes…

Of course, there's a lot of infrastructure and cat wrangling involved in fostering a working community for that sort of thing, and while there are challenges in striking the right tone and making it really effective, I think the bar is set pretty low at the moment.

How about we both move to DC and get involved in this scene and start pushing?