U.S. General Services Administration

Collaborative Expedition Workshop #64 August 14, 2007

Mapping and Navigating the Waterways of Public Information: Connecting People to Science and Scholarly

KnowledgeSusan Turnbull, GSA, Senior Program Advisor, Intergovernmental

Solutions Division, Office of Citizen Services and Communications, Co-chair, Emerging Technology Subcommittee and Co-chair, Social

Economic and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Development, Subcommittee on Networking and IT R&D

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices Across Communities• Collaborative Expedition Workshops

and Collaborative Work Environment Co-sponsors:

– GSA's USA Services - Intergovernmental Division

– Architecture and Infrastructure Committee of the Federal CIO Council – http://cio.gov

– National Coordination Office of the Subcommittee on Networking and Information Technology R & D (NITRD) and Social, Economic and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development (SEW) Coordinating Group, NITRD – http://nitrd.gov

• http://www.gsa.gov/collaborate

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Emerging Technology Subcommittee, AICTuning ET Together - From Stovepipes to Wind ChimesPurpose: This subcommittee provides an “incubator” organizing process to accelerate discovery, maturation, and validation of capabilities that leverage FEA principles and priorities. The key components of our charter are:

• Greater foresight and discernment as established and emerging technologies compete and converge

• Longer life-cycles through market-based, open standards technologies • Common understanding of business scenarios to anticipate performance

outcomes and mitigate risks. Participation in this subcommittee will help you improve your agencies’ strategic foresight and collaboration capacity around strategic IT assets. Key FY06/FY07

Activities/Deliverables 1. Forging effective IPv6 strategies

together (example in FY06)2. Life-cycle process for ET

discovery and collaborative action – http://ET.gov

3. Strategic Dialogue Among Communities at Open Forums – Collaborative Expedition Workshops

Co-Chair Contact Information

Susan Turnbull John McManus

Susan.turnbull@gsa.gov jmcmanus@doc.gov

202-501-6214

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices Across Communities• Organize around common purpose, larger than

any institution, to appreciate potentials and realities

• Improve quality of dialogue and collaborative prototyping at intergovernmental crossroads

• Participants, representing many forms of expertise, return to their settings with a larger perspective of the “whole”

– De Tocqueville “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions form associations. …In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends on the progress it has made.”

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices Across Communities• Create conducive conditions for “Breakthrough”

Innovations – from “Need to Know” -> “Need to Share” -> “Build to Share”

– To be Informed (not Overwhelmed) by the Combined Complexity of our Multiple Forms of Expertise

– Authoritative Communities of Interest/ Practice around Common Business Lines

– Agile Framework for Building Intergovernmental Services

– Emergence of Open Collaboration, Open Standards, Semantic Technologies

• “In design, we either hobble or support people’s natural ability to express forms of expertise.” Prof. David D. Woods

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices Across Communities• How can multiple Communities of Practice

discover and organize around common mission needs to build shared understanding?

• How can shared understanding around several select, urgent cross-boundary scenarios be accelerated?

• What is the role of collaborative prototyping around emerging technology potential, in light of the Federal Enterprise Architecture's Reference Models?

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices Across CommunitiesKey Findings:

• FY03 - Agile business components in innovative settings not easily discovered by e-government managers, resulting in lost or delayed opportunities for all parties.

• FY04 - Growing Opportunity to apply Emerging Technologies (web services, grid computing, and semantic web) to tune up Innovation Pipeline with better linkages.

• FY05 - Collaborative Work Environment expands effective networking across intergovernmental communities and complements monthly Collaborative Expedition Workshops; validated efficacy with Data Reference Model Working Group

• FY06 – Networking Among Communities of Practice/ Interest with Communities co-organizing the workshops, provides conducive environment to build shared understanding toward joint action around promising technology potentials

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Going Forward: From Stovepipes to Wind-Chimes• Value:

"Frontier Outpost" to open up quality conversations, augmented by “light-weight” tools, to leverage collaborative capacity of united, but diverse sectors of society, seeking to discover, frame, and act on national potentials. Over 62 workshops since March, 2001

• Results: Multiplicative Returns – 63 Expedition workshops, 60-80 participants per workshop– 19 Communities of Practice, >1500 participants– FY06: 1.12 million visits to site/3.88 million file downloads– Data Reference Model WG: 30 agencies represented,

125 participants, DRM v2.0 issued by OMB in Dec. 2005• FY07 Alignment: Networking among Communities

– Putting it all together - Planning upcoming workshops together

– Building shared understanding of fundamental concepts needed for communities representing diverse forms of expertise, to work together to leverage toward improved citizen service delivery at lower cost.

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Build on Recent Workshop Purpose and Questions To explore the potentials and realities of innovative,

Intergovernmental Practices for advancing dialogue between Government and Citizens in Support of Citizen-Centric Services.

• 1. What are the potentials and realities for Networking among Intergovernmental Communities of Practice and Communities of Interest (CoPs/ CoIs)? What role(s) can these Communities play as Innovation Catalysts in a Services Economy?

• 2. How can we establish new “norms” for collaborating together across institutional boundaries?

• 3. What are the national scenarios where distributed collaboration will be fundamental to national readiness and effective joint action by institutions?

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Build on Recent Workshop: Purpose and Questions

• 4. How can we draw on strategic leadership communities and "best practices" to move toward more agile cyberinfrastructure that transcends the high costs of insularity and advance needed innovation?

• 5. What are the opportunities for leveraging greater transparency and openness to achieve mission agility and greater value from existing and future information assets?

• 6. What "light-weight" tools are needed to support emergent governance across intergovernmental communities? How can these tools bootstrap open collaborative development with the agility needed by intergovernmental communities and their individual host institutions?

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Today’s Workshop Questions• 1. What are the Public Good and Service attributes of Public Information? Who can

make maps of Public Information today and how? How can the maps be used?

• 2. What is the current understanding around Public Information relative to government and non-government web resources, data collections, and knowledge repositories?

• 3. How can relevant stakeholders tap "build to share" principles being advanced by forward-looking information stewardship organizations, including

– d) Virtual organizations – a) Digital data and information communities advancing sound approaches for electronically

stored information. Examples include librarians, curators, web content managers, ontologists, researchers, artists, historians, data managers, and records managers.

– b) Open Standards bodies and consortia – c) International stewardship associations

• 4. What common messages can ripple across communities with deep and diverse experience with distributed collaboration, collections development, and scholarly knowledge infrastructure?

• 5. What are the conducive conditions for the creativity needed among the networked communities doing this work?

• 6. What are the emerging strategies for advancing public web content, collections management, and scholarly knowledge infrastructures with the resilience to mitigate disruptions or degradations of service over time?

• 7. What strategies are emerging to advance the public's awareness and participation in science, global virtual collections, and scholarly knowledge infrastructures?

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Draft Scenarios

• 1. Government-wide improvement communities• 2. Formal federal committees• 3. Informal communities from many settings

building trust and creating agreements to share data and tools

• 4. Formal sharing across multiple permanent and evolving collections – potential NARA scenario

• 5. Your scenario

• Revise and give to Susan Turnbull before lunch or send revisions by email (remote participants and those with laptops