Thoughts, Reflections, and Takeaways from Gov 2.0 LA

Gov 2.0 LA was a long-running unconference series in Los Angeles — sessions self-organised the morning of the event by attendees on a board, no plenary keynotes, the pattern Tim O'Reilly had helped popularise via Foo Camp and Bar Camp earlier in the decade. The LA edition, organised by Alan Silberberg and a rotating local committee, drew civic technologists, federal and state agency staff travelling for the event, university researchers, and the small layer of vendors selling into local government.

The September 2011 edition fell at a particular moment in the Gov 2.0 movement's trajectory. The 2009–2010 enthusiasm — Aneesh Chopra as federal CTO, the Open Government Directive, Code for America's first fellowship cohort about to ship — was giving way to a more measured conversation about what was actually working and what was not. The Code for America fellows from the 2011 cohort were halfway through their year-long city placements; the early federal data-portal work was running into the realities of agency data-stewardship culture; and the conference circuit was beginning to shift from celebration to assessment.

This Gov 2.0 LA was held about a year before the federal We the People petition platform launched and roughly two years before the formation of the U.S. Digital Service. The 'reflections' framing in the writeup is consistent with the broader 2011 conference-circuit mood: practitioners taking stock of what the previous two years had actually built, and thinking about what the next phase needed to look like.