I was invited to moderate a workshop panel in Maryland next week at the The American Council for Technology (ACT) - Industry Advisory Council (IAC) Management of Change 2014 event. If you arenat familiar with ACT-IAC, they are a non-profit, public-private partnership dedicated to improving government through the application of information technology--with the event bringing government leaders together, and discussing open data, open source, and APIs.
The workshop is described as:
Open Data isn’t just data sets. It’s APIs, it’s open source and, most importantly — it’s people. Working within these new concepts and methods requires a change in culture by our programs, executives, and contracting offices. In order to execute on providing open source to the public, we need new skills for the workforce that let us contract appropriately, and learn how to design our systems from the ground up with APIs and open source in mind.
I will be leading the discussion between a panel of X subject matter experts:
- Kevin Youel-Page - Assistant Commissioner, Integrated Award Environment, General Services Administration
- Dan Gahafer - Forge.mil Program Manager, Defense Information Systems Agency
- Leigh Heyman - Director of New Media Technologies, the White House
- Dan Lockney – Technology Transfer Program Executive, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Pamela Wise-Martinez - Senior Strategic Enterprise Architect, Office of the Director of National Intelligence
I’m honored to have been invited to help lead the discussion, which is in alignment with my mission to bring awareness of the power of APIs amongst government leaders. I’m looking forward to what I, and the rest of the event, can learn from these government leaders regarding how they are using open data, open source software, and APIs to effect change within their agencies.
The fact that we are having conversations like this at the highest levels of government in 2014, after four years of API evangelism, makes me hopeful that we are making progress, in not just changing how we do business, or how the government operates, but also how the private and public sector both work together in the emerging API economy.
