Topic: Government

What makes an application platform a lasting success? Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of TCP/IP, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, and Tim Sparapani, Facebook' Director of Public Policy, talk about their experience building international, highly adopted platforms in a discussion moderated by John Markoff.

Michael Calabrese argues that the FCC's apportioning of the airwave spectrum gives a false impression of scarcity. The government's spectrum apportioning doesn't take into account the capabilities and accuracy of today's digital radio equipment, carving unnecessarily wide detours around both federal and commercial properties, and ignoring low-power opportunities. The recent DTV shift freed 18 channels, netting $2B at auction. More can be done to optimize spectrum use.

Congressman John Culberson R-TX is TWL - Tweeting While Legislating. Espousing the power of the "fun" of "town meetings and tea parties," he's committed to bringing the real-time, blow-by-blow of Congressional deliberations to his subscribers. This moderated speech and discussion with Tim O'Reilly draws a loose analogy between technological innovation and government, asking: Are transparency and open access always compatible with deliberative process or innovative development?

In this audio interview from the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo in New York, O'Reilly Media founder and tech guru Tim O'Reilly speaks with Deputy CTO of the United States and Director of the Open Government Initiative Beth Noveck. The two discuss successes, challenges and a culture shift that is happening as a result of President Obama's mandate to make government more transparent, participatory and collaborative.

Brad Templeton, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, talks about privacy issues, his company's wiretapping suit against AT&T, the history of anti-surveillance laws and judicial structure in the US, what it knows about current surveillance, the state of the suit today, and why privacy issues matter for the innovation of telephony.

The Barack Obama administration ushered in a new model of cooperation between citizens and their government. In this audio interview from the Gov 2.0 Summit, O'Reilly Media founder, Tim O'Reilly, speaks with America's first Federal Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, about using technology to build a digital commonwealth and a digital nation.

With the arrival of the Obama administration, a new attitude of openness and transparency of the Internet and other technologies is being espoused. In an overview of this new change of position, Maura Corbett outlines the government's desire to establish a non-discrimination policy and thus keep the Internet open and protected. In the second half of the program Corbett takes questions about this policy.

Every year, the United States government spends a huge amount of money on its web projects. At somewhere on the order of tens of millions of dollars per project, the majority of this money goes to few select software vendors. It would be nice, though, if some of it were to come to the open source community. Clay Johnson of Sunlight Labs tells us what we can do as open source developers to grab a piece of the action.

While the United States has been a leader in global entrepreneurship, other countries are also getting in on the act. But the movement abroad has not been without its struggles. In this panel discussion at a conference convened by the Hoover Institute at Stanford, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs talk about what it takes to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem in a variety of countries. They look at challenges as well as lessons from nations that have been particularly successful in creating startups, such as India and Taiwan.

The U.S. government is working to grow the "ecosystem" for entrepreneurship abroad as a part of its international development efforts. In this audio lecture, Richard Boly, a member of the U.S. Foreign Service, discusses how he managed a program of the U.S. embassy to promote entrepreneurship in Italy, a country steeped in bureaucracy and lacking engines of innovation. Speaking at a conference convened by the Hoover Institute at Stanford, he details efforts to connect entrepreneurs with the resources and role models they need to be successful.