government can pull off any kind of perfection. i am suggesting that there needs to be some balance. i am suggesting that there needs to be some more competition, as governor dean has articulate. i think we are overweighted in terms of dependency on the insurance companies for making the most crucial life-and-death decisions. i think we need to intervene and to rectify the balance to provide more affordable, more accessible, and in some cases, higher quality health care. that is all. this will be the last question, actually. ravina westphal? .

>> go-ahead. sorry, i did not read it right. you have got the microphone? jessica? >> people talk about the idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. >> the question on the card, if you will. >> when does reforming itself become more important than cooperation? >> when does what? >> windows reform itself become more important in cooperation -- when does reform itself become more important than cooperation? >> i do not understand the

question. let's try peggy connor, she is opposed as well. >> ok. i also work for anova. anova i do care for the people that are disadvantaged. i am a kindergarten teacher, but i will be nice. >> you do not have to be. [laughter] >> friends of ours from france have a medical card that has an electronic chip that has all of the medical information, from birth to wherever they are. that frankly scares me. i said to them -- you want the government knowing all of your business? [applause]

i believe that our country was founded on independence. i think it is important that we have privacy between our doctor and our health records. it should not be shared with the government. [applause] under what moral jurisdiction does the constitution allow you to do that? >> first of all, let me thank all of you on both sides as this is the last one. i think that everyone has behaved well, this is a spirited american tradition and i appreciate it. all of you. [applause] secondly, the interesting thing about this is that one of the biggest problems in medicine was raised in the last question. sort of like a psychiatrist patient asking the tough one on the way out the door so that no

one can deal with it. this is a huge issue, much more than the health care bill. this is not just about health care. you not want the government to know all your information, you are not so crazy about having the insurance agencies or banks in knowing the information either -- but that is how you get all that junk mail. this is a much bigger issue than health care, which is a big issue. here is what folks are struggling with. we want to have records that are complete, patients are cared for better if the doctor taking care of them knows it is complete. the president put in a lot of money in the stimulus package for advanced medical records so that if you get sick in some place that is 1,000 miles from her home, if you have the chip,

you can carry your records with you. if you cannot tell them anything, if they have your medication, that is important. what guards are there against privacy? a bill was passed about six or eight years ago, it was called hipa. the problem is that it is not enough. just the other day someone stole credit card numbers, and there is no good answer to this. in this information age there is going to be, and there already is, more information available

than anyone in our generation would ever be comfortable in other people's hands. the more information that health care professionals have, the better it is. this is an open question. i do not think that anyone knows the right answer. how will we build a wall between the government and corporate america so that our private information stays private. but there are people that need to know our private information, one of them is our health care provider. this is an important question for which there is no answer. i hate to leave on this kind of a note, but it is a great question. i have enjoyed this, i hope that jim has as well. [applause] >> let me start where we began by thanking all of you. this is important.

as with every major transformative struggle that our society and economy has gone through, be it social security of the 1930's, the civil-rights struggles of the 1960's, this should be difficult. it affects everyone. we are certainly not going to get it right unless we hear from all sides. i thank all of you for coming, thank you for participating. it was helpful. certainly helpful to me. thank you. those of you that did not get a chance to ask your question, i am sorry. i hope that the questions asked represented what you have asked if he'd had the opportunity. thank you very much. >> that was not as bad as it could have been.

ok, thanks. nice to see you. yeah. >> [inaudible] i appreciate the bipartisan effort. >> i only heard the last part. good to see you. >> [inaudible] >> ok. i will take a look at it. thank you. >> i just wanted to say that it is a wonderful bipartisan effort, noble and admirable, but it takes two to tango.

>> it would be helpful if we had another point to content -- to compare with. >> thank you for you thank you for coming -- thank you for coming to this. >> [inaudible] >> thank you, sir. thank you. >> this was obviously very difficult with this crowd. we only have 45 minutes to give to the public. [inaudible] >> good to see you again.

how're you doing? nice to see you. ok, ok. good. >> [inaudible] >> thank you for doing this. [inaudible] >> they should have. i am sorry. i did not realize that. >> [inaudible]

>> no, they are not really. it is a basic package that private insurance ads to. ok, ok. see you later. yeah, yeah. good to see you. >> [inaudible] >> is a good bill, actually. >> great job. >> thank you. >> there is no more money.

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2009] >> as the debate over health care continues, our health care hub is the best resource. watch the latest events, including town hall meetings, sharing your thoughts on the issue with your old citizen video, including video from any town halls that you have gone too. >> a live look at the american flag on the u.s. capitol, above the senate chamber, in tribute to senator kennedy, who died last night after a yearlong battle with brain cancer. president obama marker -- remarked this morning about senator kennedy.

>> i wanted to say a few words this morning about the passing of an extraordinary leader, senator edward kennedy. over the past few years i have had the honor to call him a colleague, counselor, and friend. even though we knew that this they was coming for some time, we waited it with no small amount of dred. since his diagnosis last year, we have seen the courage with which he battles his illness. these months have led him here, people from every corner of our nation and around the world, showing how much he meant to all of us. despite the opportunities that we were denied when his brothers were taken from us. we were given the blessing of time to say thank you and goodbye. the outpouring of love,

gratitude, the fund memories to which we have all borne witness, a way in which this singular figure in american history have touched our lives. these ideals are stamp on scores of laws and reflected in millions of lives. seniors the know the big tent -- seniors that know the date -- dignity. children and now the promise of an education. in all that note an america that is more equal and more just, including myself. the kennedy name is synonymous with the democratic party. at times he was part of partisan campaign attacks. in the united states senate i can think of no one that engendered greater respect from members of both sides of the aisle. the seriousness of his purpose was potentially -- perpetually matched by his warmth and good cheer.

he passionately fought for others, doing so peerlessly on the senate floor. he became one of the most accomplished senators and americans ever to serve our democracy. his extraordinary life on this earth has come to an end. the good that he did lives on. for his family, he was a guardian. for america he was a defender of a dream. i spoke this morning to his beloved wife, vicki, who was until the end such a wonderful source of encouragement and strength. our thoughts and prayers are with her and his children, the entire kennedy family, a decade's worth of his staff, the people of massachusetts, and all

americans who, like us, will miss him. >> the associated press reported this afternoon that senator kennedy will be buried in arlington national cemetery. we are live for a government conference on using social media to get its content out. live coverage just getting under way. >> we are here this afternoon to talk about a very important subject. president obama, on inauguration day, january 21, issued a memo to all government employees. in this memo he highlighted the importance of an open government, the directive and the hint that the government shall be transparent and participatory, as well as collaborative. that the innovative tools and weapons be implemented for this

vision. today we will be discussing these innovative tools to try to propel the government even further into the area of social media. a special welcome to our attendees and c-span viewers around the world, who are listening to our outstanding speakers on best practices. we are pleased to prevent this fourth -- present this forth in our series of events. for those of you that are not totally familiar with the forum, it was founded 27 years ago as a nonprofit organization for seminars like the one today, seminars and conferences, as well as other educational activities for the federal government. i would invite viewers to log in

to potomac forum web site, www.potomacforum.gov for future activities. this morning's program featuring the keynote speaker, the commandant of the united states coast guard, admiral chad allen. those presentations can also be found on c-span. please check the schedule. in implementing the tools of the government has made, there are enormous strides that have been made in the last few years, they continue to be made by outstanding leaders, as well as the government community. the leaders in the technology community have sponsored today's symposium. we would like to thank our brand sponsor, microsoft, and the platinum innovation gallery sponsors, adobe, and hard about

-- encarta, iqm2, mcafee and jive. our organizational sponsors, including the bethesda chapter of the electronics association, gov loop, and napa. we will hear more about the collaboration between them shortly. again, welcome to our fourth in a series of social media programs. we are very pleased that you could join us today, in person and through the airwaves. i would like to turn the program over to our executive for web 2.0 digital media, ken fischer. please join us. >> thank you. we will be creating a

collaborative wiki with the online community to share what is presented here for a much broader audience. i hope that everyone here can participate in that. we will be getting e-mails updating the project and the coverage. leaving off, jack cold, the senior strategist at dod, and he has played a part in the strategies at the pentagon. he and i, together, we came up with a idf for the section of the official leadership tool, many months ago. that led to the leadership question this morning with admiral allen. it has in turn led to this broader event. he is a great guy to talk with and share ideas. here to talk about leading in

the public good, jackal -- jack holt. [applause] >> can you hear me? can you hear me now? can you hear me now! there rio. i was doing an interview the other day -- what do you do have no one has ever -- what do you do? no one has ever asked me that before. we talked about it. really, probably the core of my job right now is to get people to think differently about what we think about. as we start this, i want to pose a question to you. i am used to doing workshops, i am kind of interactive. i would like to have some responses, if you know what i

mean. what would you consider to be the first high-speed internet? >> intercept? >> good answer. anyone else? >> [inaudible] >> that is one that i get. what i said hard surface roads? is that change the way you think about the environ today. what was the story behind card service roman roads? blinking. they were built for a military

purpose, laid out in public. part of a military command -- communications effort, committing information from the headquarters of a front-line. i am going to talk about some of the bat -- best practices from dod. i will be dispersing that would leadership issues. you are going to be thinking a bit differently about it. let's see if i can figure out the equipment. so, we need a public option. i was reading a post at nato a couple of months ago. everyone was talking about information assurance and collection. the information address will remain at rest unless acted on

by an outside force. best libraries in the world are no good to us if we cannot get in the front door. information at rest remains at rest. communication is information in action. people communicate to do things. we want to change something. we want an adjustment. that is why we communicate. looking at the communication model, can we talk about been here? we are used to this in the things that we deal with, a one- way linear communication. interaction and communication has always been on telephone. letters. those things that are one-on- one, typically, one-on-one communication.

we have got a more transactional environment now. transactional communication, face-to-face -- does that mean physical space? in the same as it? we have tools out here where we can imand voice and voice chat d video caht all the time. does face to face mean that we are here? it does not. it could mean me through c-span. the problem with that one is that there is no ready feedback loop. which is more powerful? which is more informative? which is more collaborative? think about that. now, when we go back to the president's memorandum and his initiatives for open, collaborative, transparent

government, the government of the united states has been collaborative from day one. it was meant to be participatory. if it is collaborative, by its nature is participatory. we vote, we invite people to collaborate on the laws that we live by. that is the way it has been since the beginning. so, what has changed? >> liability? >> liability, information -- >> you do not know who you are talking to. >> true, that could be. unless you are face-to-face. thinking about this differently opens some possibilities. communication is leadership. leadership is communication.

how many others are in leadership positions, or have been. you cannot leave me with my members of my squad and a platoon with me telling them to go do this. they need to know that i am engaged. that is a part of leadership. they will not do anything unless i communicate to them. communication is leadership. there is also responsibility in this. the responsibility of leadership is to communicate. with that responsibility is something that we do not necessarily talk about much or learn much about. we can go to class is on public speaking, writing, publishing.

has anyone ever been to a class about listening? listening is probably one of the most understated pieces of the communication model. i grew up in oklahoma. but my grandfather taught me is cherokee proverb. if you listen to whispers, you will not hear screams. admiral allen has put himself in a position to lead by beating by listening. -- by leading by listening. we have this strategic communications road map that basically asks us to develop a way to communicate in a new 24/7 media environment.

this is 2006. most people in the pentagon were asking what mia is. others are still asking what strategic communication is. we will get to that in a moment. what does this mean? when we look at this, what does it mean? we boiled down to taking the commanders intent from the pointy end of the spear to the comp the end of the cat. there are people across this nation -- comfy end of the couch. there are people across this nation who want to know what we are doing. how are they getting that information? first question, what is strategic communication. lots of different thoughts and attitudes about this. i have got a business background of marketing and advertising, lots of different things. but strategic communication is

simple, figuring out who i need to know, what, when, where are they and how to reach them? that seems simple, but what will i tell them? what is the story line? what is it that they need to know? do what am i communicating with them? an interesting thing when we talk about strategic communication, a film professor told me once that every movie begins with the end. the writer, the director, have all agreed what they want the people to walk out with. they have not, in state in mind. they tell the story frame by

frame, scene by scene, sequence in sequence. if they do not lay out that way, no one has context. no one understands. you can i go to -- you cannot go to a movie unless we put the mission haahead. they tell me that some things out of stories, but though it is interesting they do not have space in the paper. the they do not have the time or the inches. very good reasons.

so, how are you going to get published when your story is not rise to the local news. there are things that people know and that they will understand. who are we speaking to? who needs a carrot? we are speaking to journalists and reporters who are taking those stories and following through, not seeing print. they are not getting your time. they are not getting out. there are many reasons for that. what we have to do is figure out who is telling our story. in this new media environment, lots of people are telling our story. they were arguing about what was in the different papers, arguing

those points. it was the public square and the people rising to the top had a basic grasp of the rules of debate, which amounted two things. if you are strong in those things, you start rising to the top. it was pretty ugly out there. there were a lot of arguments. it was all based on second-hand and third hand information. what would happen if we could

energize a group of, a the other we found these things very interesting. this particular study is online. they examine these stories for across the nation, engaging american interest in these topics. the iwe have asked people what y thought about it. the gray line is the amount of interest expressed, a lot of

interest in the surge proposal, we expected to see that. events in iraq, we live down the the other end on the home front. people were wondering what the average iraqi thinks about what is going on in their hometown. we have found this scheme in 2008, up pretty much justifying what we were doing.

for 2009 they look at the percentage change of the audience. newspapers are down, local television is down, audio is down -- up, all mine is up. while using the traditional media was falling off while the newer elements were rising and the speed, could be. marketing. access? that is a very good point.

i want to know how the question was passed. i have found, anecdotally, if i asked people how they get their news, they will name of radio and television. if i ask them how to get information, they will tell me the ruble -- google. what is the difference? other than the way that i phrase the question. the other issue is choice. there are a lot more choices in those other domains. online, the ubiquity of cable television and the internet. you can expand your horizons. again, are you more informed by one source or have you been to college with a professor that

would lead to get by with one source? one source on your paper? we have learned that the hard way. it raises other questions, like what is the audience. not who, but what. thinking a bit differently. so, i ask you, is the audience a spectator or a participant? they're both. in this environment, they are both. will they comment? the hands. maybe not. will they come?

yeah. what happens when i want to comment and there is not a place for it? things to think about. how do you target an audience in an environment like this? we figured that we have got to figure out who is talking about us and go out. are you familiar with internal and external horizontal and vertical media horizontal media, those are the big picture guys. you probably have a publication within your organization that says the same thing, commanding the information message broad spectrum. on the horizontal line, we have got internal and an external

publications, things targeted for a specific audience. military review magazines, for example. why do we do this? what is the purpose for engaging in these mechanisms? feedback? to give their readers to target us. to find out information. for at least 60 years that was the only way that we had to do that. that was our mechanism. talk to the press, let them talk to the public. what we didn't have was a very good feedback loop. that was the way it was and that was a way that state until now. so, what did they start doing with the round table? a lot of people looked at me very funny when we started this. here is what i was thinking at

the time. in looking at the internet, communication is a wave across it. i looked for those people in the public that were talking about what we were doing. kind of like overhearing someone at the water cooler talking about your project. so, that was not anything. i found a group of folks out there that were self-professed military officers, members, many of them not officers. they had really good comments, they were writing some thoughtful pieces based on what they saw in the press. but, go back and remember that not all of our stories are getting into the press.

kinetic operations were news. opening a hospital or a school, putting people back to work, that is not news. it kind of is, but i see the point. it is not. is that any less reason to find a way to tell the story? this is what we did, we engaged the bloggers, inviting them to the table, there was an immediate impact in perception. through this mechanism we had people that were very well researched and knowledgeable about military affairs, they were asking very good questions in an interview process with the the people on the ground, making decisions daily. there were not any journalists down there. that was not their realm. that was not news. it was important information. we were given the opportunity to engage with a group of folks

around this, building a body of knowledge throughout the public domain. engaging in the public debate with the public. was everybody interested? nope. but at certain times this guy over here would write about a certain theme, or this lady over here would have a certain piece, she wanted to get in on the conversation. we allowed it happen. a lot of times many conversations took place that we did not even know about. it just happened because we open the door to it. one of the lessons that we learned on this was that we should also, not only conduct and allow others to write about it, we need to write about it as well. so, we would write it internally.

along with a link to the transcript and audio files, primarily because blockers were saying that we need that out there to verify what we are saying, we want everyone to know that we were there. we can hear you on the phone, play the audio file, that interaction and verification, that ability to link to the actual source documentation gave them credibility. that rise in readership and brought more people to them. some of the people coming to them were actual journalists. now that the information is out there and in the public domain, more people have access to it. this story came out in "the washington post."

we did an interview with douglas stone, he was in charge of detaining operations here in iraq. he had been talking to the press for a few weeks prior to doing our roundtable. he was gaining no traction. nobody was picking up. nobody understood what he was talking about. in the course of this interview process, the general comes out and we conducted it like any other media interview. we have him call in, everything was in line, and they come on line, the general makes his opening statement. one of the first questions that was asked, ok, sounds like everything is coming up sun shines in roses in baghdad. but what does this mean to us?

the general was talking about the changes that he made in the operations. what makes you an insurgent? why are you here? turns out that there were certain things that he noticed in all of those interviews. they were unemployed, it's literate, had no job or skills. so, the first thing that they started to do was bring some of the out of work school teachers in baghdad to the campus. it was completely voluntary. no one was forced to do anything. the teacher would hold a class. they all find out and sign up. they would have the local imams , in and teach a class on -- come in and teach a class on the koran.

metalworking, different skills, things they could take back to their communities. the general started telling a story. what did this mean? number one, there was a miniature riot in one of their camps. it happened a couple of times. the group that had come together as a part of schooling , they threw one fellow against the fence and pulled out his beard. it marked the man as an outcast. they told the guard that the man was al qaeda and that he did not have to be in there with them. something that we did not know how to do as americans, but they started celled selecting. the other issue, this was a story that got the attention of the researchers at the

washington post. the general says that they stopped calling the releases detainee releases, they started calling them graduations. the community would except these people back. at one of the graduations a lady walked up and said general, can you keep my son one more year? >> he said that she did not understand. >> he is free to go, but she said he did not understand. in the village there were no schools for teaching. maybe next year he can come home. that story catches the attention of the people at "the washington post." it is top of the banner, traditional media, working to reshape iraqi detainee's. not only that, but from the transcript, from the interview

he wrote the story -- it was not part of a call. he wrote two more stories that came out in a weekend edition of events in iraq in the washington post. there were three stories from the interview that he was not involved in. for that is how the power of this started happening. online video, one of the things that we noticed was and tethering information, giving people the opportunity to circulate. can you see up here? if you go to the web site, you will have the ability to either download the video that you find or you can embed them in your own blog. that means that the blog error -- logger -- blogger can imbed

that and taking -- and it takes the load of them. bonn tethering the information and putting it in other places, -- untethering the information and putting it in other places, tying it back to our website, where the official information besides. audio web casting is still something that we are experimenting with. we did a contract just to see what we could get. one of our programs that started late last year, created for the military health system -- there were a lot of questions about try care and what were other questions where people had no place to ask. people started coming. and every two weeks we had 23,000 downloads from talk

radio. that was from just a handful of programs out there. the other one, a kind of interesting, armed with science. we started this one not knowing what would happen with that, the first program was on the atomic pocket. who knew? in january we did that once per week. from january until march, about eight weeks, there were over 33,000 downloads from the sites out there. that is a lot of people pulling down eight shows. those were people that wanted to know more about it. it was stuff that was not news, but there were people that cared about it. so, one of the things to be realized, it may not be specifically spelled out, but

the intent is the same. what is your intent? what is your goal? the same intent is there. we have to go through to scrub the policies to figure out how to update them to take into consideration this new environment. one of the other things that we found, this relates back to leadership. decision making has fundamentally changed. the volumes, math, and speed of information that is available for a leader, it is irresponsible not to take that into consideration. how do you manage that information flow and effectively? fact -- flow and effectively -- flow effectively? on the flip side of that is the democracy of access.

people are expecting to have access. people expected. why should not have access? there had better be a good reason to deny access. people are coming in with the expectation of having access. the democracy of access to information, because from a leadership standpoint that volume of information, you also need to know what else is going on from inside of your organization. should every soldier be a spokesman? why not? we have considered that for years now. 20 years in the military, that was always the case. every soldier is a spokesman. he talks about what he is doing. why not let him talk? major general oaks started a blog when he was in baghdad. he said he wanted on varnished

information. he said he might be reluctant to tell his pse what he needs to know, but they have no problem being candid on a blog and that is what i need. i need the information. that also increased the time and expanded the reach. and that is what was said from the beginning. time and reach expanded. if you know how to manage and the tools are here. again, i will go back to the roman roads. what did people do with them? public travel? trade, markets, cultural exchange. st. designations, housing designations, street addresses,

the postal system, all developing from one simple series. humans order themselves around in their environment to suit their needs. what are they doing today that we need to facilitate? that is kind of the role of government right now. order is empowered by the access to information. so, kind of keep that in mind as we go through the rest of the conference. we will be thinking about these things. the way that people get information, the way that they inform themselves today, but leadership should consider as far as democracy have access to that information. not only are you getting transparency, not only is there access to, for example, front-

line troops, but is also the ability for the commander to access the frontline troops's information. a lot of power in that knowledge management. questions? comments? >> innovations, from what i can remember, there was very controversial policy in the dod, but i wanted to focus on your comment about every soldier being a spokesperson. that is the key, an obvious platform. if you cannot control it, that

is true, but you do not need to. i think that i lot of the leadership has been imposed. so, as far as your innovation in moving forward, they now have the defense media. i know that they are doing a lot of great stuff. certain leaders are really taking to the blogs. what you think? what is in the future for them? >> the future is access. the future is opening up. every soldier is a spokesman. part of the question goes back to what dr. ross said this morning. your organization, you just do not know it. they are out there, they are seeking. when we look back through

history, what are the things that are the most endearing, informing our ideas and concepts over the civil war? the thing that is found tattered and torn and barely readable 150 years later? that informs the story. so, those things are extremely important -- anyone ever played the telephone game? where you whisper in the year of another person? you can never control the message. the message is controlled by those repeating it. if you stay in the conversation, you can control the effect that you intended by the message. as i said in the beginning, as human beings we communicate to change things. that is in the fact that i wanted to have where it was beneficial for me to stay in the conversation going on around by

activities, guiding my discussion, correcting the misinformation, just as we are doing right here. there is a lot of power in that. this is one of the interesting things that we have found in our studies -- senior leaders, the moment the they were exposed, the moment that they got to the roundtable, at the end of it they were asking if they had to stop and if they could call back next week. if they could do it again. they were jumping all over it because it gave them a chance to tell their story. in that dynamic that is the group of leaders that are coming forward now saying that there is a better way to do this. dod, u.s. military, we have got a long history of things that do not work very well.

especially when it comes to public affairs and communications. we have got failure after failure after failure at this point. a few things worked well based on the technology of the time, but this new technology is such a paradigm shift in the cultural considerations within the organization, we have to take it into effect. .

>> there is a lot of effort in that now and a lot of good stuff that has happened. >> i agree with thieu that communicators need to be out there with the population domestic and foreign. there is a certain group with regard to this discussion that will throw their hands up and say there's too many threats. what is your thoughts about that? can you hit on the training aspect? >> one admiral brought that up earlier today. there are security threats. no doubt about it. there are security threats out there. but we are the u.s. military. we do not run from a threat. we don't hide from a threat. we train our people to meet a threat. we do not look up infantry troops and drive them around and not let them out, afraid we will

be shot at. we train them to maneuver on the battlefield, whether it is in the open field or in urban combat. we train them to meet the threat on that field. we need to do the same thing here. the preponderance of those threats are human element threats. it is people doing stupid things. do they know they are stupid? do they realize what is going on here? why are we not training them to me that threat? my point is that if i can train those troops to meet this threat and give them the ability to train their families to meet this threat, we have now secured, not only the troops but their families and the dod enterprise. it is good for us, why is it not also good for the american public? shouldn't everybody know this stuff? was to keep us from putting it out there in the public comments? >> you are also talking about

threats. i worked at fort lewis for a while. when the problems we had was when a soldier died over there, before their families were notified, it was on somebody's blog and the wife found out on the blog instead of having soldiers come to her house. he the way it would have sought. it was worse that she read it on a blog instead of having somebody be there with her and for her. if you talk about teaching about threats, you also must teach about what not to post. everybody was in pain and a porter on their block. -- on their block. >> the trip is in pain as well. part of his patent mitigation is to get it off his chest. one of the things we have to realize about working in this and farming is that is still publishing.

there are rules in publishing, defamation rules apply, the laws apply but those are people understand the rules of engagement in the field of maneuver they are working in. those are the things we have to let people know. we are doing them no service as leaders if we are not informing them about what they should not do and why. this is why it is important. getting that turning to them various stages of their careers, it starts in basic training. the minute they comment -- this should probably go for government workers across the board -- the minute you come into government service, there are certain things you need to know. you have just placed yourself in a different place in society. you are now held by society in a different place.

you need to understand that place. our society -- what are side expects of you and our government expense of you and what your co-workers expect from you. thank you all, very much. we have one more? >> yes? >> can you talk about how you identified participants for the dod bloggers round table? >> i scoured the internet, i got on google, and i punched in dod or onbar problems or war in iraq and saw who was talking. i found out who was talking about and i could go up and look and see what they are ready for it are they ready to pull pranks? or are they just spewing? there is a lot of noise out there. it goes back to something that dr. wells mentioned, separating the wheat from the chaff. there are people out there who are writing good stuff. they could write better stuff if we give them access. one of the things that was a

common fallacy for many people in the press, who were throwing rocks at us for what we're doing, as well as people of different viewpoints who said we are preaching to the choir. listen to the questions. they may be, i won't say, friendly because some of those questions were very pointed. they may have been a bit sympathetic simply because they have a base of knowledge that they are working from. they would hold these leaders accountable in public for what it was they were saying and doing and what the perceptions were. this is what was such a draw to the leaders. now it gives them the opportunity to correct the record. i will end on one story --

called sam caught was the commander of anbar province in 2007. he came on and had some bloggers round tables. he knew what to expect. he comes on there and talks about everything that is happening in anbar province, the rise of the sons of anbar which became the sons of iraq's program. a lot of those things were nations at the time. he comes on and gives an opening statement the first question out of the box was," in the near times this morning, there was a story on the battle of ramadi where 300 people died. what can you say to that dax?" he said it did not happen here this morning. he contended that it did not happen in the past week because there has not been a shot fired in ramadi where the headquarters

were in one week. he could not answer it because he did not aware that that information. there was a backlash "on the new york times," they're paying him for a story and you're one. colonel simcox told them to come down there. he wants to -- you want to embed them and see what he was talking about. when this transcript got out, the folks at the brookings institute got ahold of it and one of their experts was asking whether they knew what they knew about what was going on record he took another trip. he came back. after his report from that trip, we start saying general petraeus walk in the markets in ramadi,

senators, congressmen, the president of united states walking markets and hammadi. -- inramadi. they did not expect that because that's not the with the stories were being told perry that changed the perspective which put context to what was going on on the ground in anbar province. that was the power behind some of these things. just opening the conversation, letting the guy on the ground who is taking the heat for the questions but gives him the chance to answer. thank you. [applause] beckham very much. thanks. >> it is great that the pentagon is taking so seriously getting out correct information into the public sphere so that they can better and inform the public,

the public wants to know. it is not always on the front page of the newspaper because the only have so much space on the front page. in a different area, we have coming up next, stephanie green hat from the national archives and records administration. communities are increasingly important online. it is a new thing for the government to be involved in community facilitation and encourage communities rather than simply messaging. one of the white house open government innovation calories selectees is the virtual community for educators. here is stephanie to tell us more about that. [applause] stepahinie greenhut. >> thank you.

good afternoon. my name is stephanie greenhut. i and the educational information expert at the national archives in washington. it is a very different kind of thing i will talk about. i am part of the education team. we are former classroom teachers. our goal at the archives is to get up holdings of the national archives, to let them be teachable tools, to given to teachers, students, the public, and in the education world, we call the primary sources. we want teachers to be using primary sources as much as possible. and so, we developed an online kennedy called collaborate.

the community members include us at the national out process, the education team members, but also educators from across the country, maybe some educators we have worked in the past, maybe educators' we have never met. it is a place for this community to come together online on this website and to share ideas. what we are doing, all of this is a means to an end here we are trying to get to a place to develop a brand new education website called docs teach. we want to get primary sources and the means to use them in turn in the hands of the educators and the public. the community collaborate is a means to an end, working on creating this education website educationdocs teach. we were featured on the white house innovation's gallery.

we have the video on youtube so if you are interested in hearing more about what the collaborate community is, please check it out there. we knew we really wanted to engage educators in our conversation. as we started thinking about creating a new web site, before we even had this collaborate website idea, before it was a tiny seed, we brought in some educators that we have worked with in the past and we started brainstorming. what is it that teachers want? teachers have access to primary sources but what can we do differently from the national archives to help teachers out? we brought in a group of educators and started brainstorming and we were looking for feedback. we were looking for genuine input. we knew that we wanted this

information to actually inform the design of the site. we created collaborate. it has become an online continuation of that brainstorming session. it has even more members. rather than develop a website and show it to some teachers and ask them what they think, we are throwing out questions along the way to get the feedback up front while we are in the design stage in using that information to inform the process. acontinuing with that, on this n my community, i will post a question. we tried to make these as sincere questions as possible. i do not pose the question that i am not actually interested in getting an answer to or that the feedback from i wouldn't be interested in incorporating into our design of the website.

we focus on having sincere questions. for example, what should we name the new site before we get started. it cannot get more sincere than that. we did not have a name. we want to call it something and we had a conversation in the forum. we eventually came out with the name "docs teach." as we were thinking about collaborate, we were going to do this on my community. we had to think about who is in this community. do we invite people to the 20? do we let people find us and join us? these were real conversations we were having. should it require registration? should anyone be allowed to post? what we settled on is that it is very open. anyone can go to the url and

collaborate. when you look at the presentation, you can get that url. anyone can go there and read and register and join the conversation and post their comments or questions, if they have them, or start their own conversation. we also knew we needed to get the community started. growing questions out there, we would know if anyone knew about it. what we did to try and foster a sense of community right off the bat is we chose some people that we had worked with in the past. educators, museum educators, teacher-educators, even students taking education courses to become teachers, beginning teachers that we knew and we invited them. this to the couple of things. we think it creates a motivation off the bat because

you were selected especially to be in the first corps of -- a core group of educators. these people were stakeholders. they had a genuine interest and -- in how this docs teach web site will look and then. have an interest in us any good usable website. our bush's call for the site is to -- are ambitious goal for the site is that every teacher- educator who is teaching students have become teachers would want to show this to their students as a great example. with that lofty goal in mind and that lofty goal expressed to the educators in this on my community, we have said about asking questions and saying where we're headed and asking what we need to do to get there. right off the bat, we did something else to expand this community. as soon as we invited the

initial set of colleagues, we also invited them to invite their colleagues. we tried to keep this multiplying off the bat because we know that the people we invited our stakeholders. they are interested but we know from working with them that they are on the same wavelength as us. they believe in the teaching value of primary sources. we knew that they would choose educators on the same wavelength, as well. we are trying to expend a community that way. since then, we have also posted in other on-line forums the invitation to join. we have posted this on the national archives facebook page to join. other ways we are sending this out for social media and including word of mouth. we have teachers coming in four workshops. we are still expanding the community. we knew why we wanted to do this. we know who would start with us. then, we had to figure how we would do this.

i will say, in a room full of people with government experience, that we actually somehow managed to do this and a little over a month, to put this together and get this out. the way we did this was with a nominal partners. we worked both with the foundation for the national archives and second story enter active. we have worked with both of them extensively in the past on a previous website called the digital of vaults and on museum exhibits and the national archives. they were able to help us achieve this in lightning speed. what our partners could also do was give us some direction as far as how to do this. how can we create this online community whose goal is to create a new website? we have to keep that in goal in

mind, right? the goal here is not for this on my community. the goals for the on my committee to produce something very, very valuable to a broader community of educators around the country. our partners at second story were able to take open storage software and adapted to our look and need. when you visit collaborate, you see what looks like a blob. i will update that with information and questions but if you are interested in participating in a conversation, then you go back into the forum. that is where the conversation is really happening and where we would like to see lots of action and participation. when we had people on the site and we knew why we were doing this and we got the how going a

little bit, we realized that our audience and participants and users are a better -- are a very heterogeneous group of people. they are tech-savvy. we had to give multiple avenues for participation. one of those was that we wanted to encourage subscriptions or encourage people to stay up-to- date with what was happening on collaborate. not only did we have bell link to get the rss feed, but provide the tutorial for it as well perry we might have people who have not done that before. how do you subscribe to the male fetus? have you participate? have you had a message to the farm? -- forum.

we understood how important it was to give people alternate ways to communicate with you. again, our heterogeneous group of participants, some are very very comfortable and tend to be maybe those teachers graduating college, starting in the classroom for the first time and are very comfortable adding their comments on monetary -- on this forum. my teachers who are not and don't think it is their place. we found it was important to provide other avenues for participation. maybe you don't want to post what to have to say so give me a call or get my boss i call or send us an e-mail. providing those other avenues were very helpful. we had to think about what is going on this website. we are looking to get feedback here.

how much conversation do we want to have on the website? do we want to post every little secret about the site? we ended up saying that if you are on an education team, signed up, you have a user name. we have authentic communication going on. when i post where block, i will post as collaborate team, if that is a unified place that the team has decided upon. we might throw the question but i say to the education team members as well as the community, here is the new question, what do you think? what we have happening is our colleagues are answering questions, participating in the conversation, and they might be expressing ideas that i have not heard yet because it is between meetings. it is becoming a place for

authentic internal communications, even though it is with a larger audience. i think that helps when the audience sees that. it is creating that sense of community. of course, our goal is to get lots of feedback and ask lots of questions. we found also that it is important to share information. there are times when i post but i do not have a question but i do let people know the community will members know what is going on right now. i found it is important -- if i ask a question, we get lots of feedback. it is important to make sure and go back. this is something that is easy to forget when you go on posts the next question. you need to go back and provide some sort of conclusion. we thank them for the input in took an idea or came up with something else by putting ideas together. when people see that

continuation, that is when you feel you are a part of something because you have seen it from beginning, to the middle, to the end. we post informative thanks. on the docsteach web site, we have just figured out how it will work. we have developed different lesson temples that teachers can use to pop primary sources into and teach with their class as part of we have provided one example. if i am going to ask you questions about what you think we should do, then you should know what is going on. you should know the current status of the project and know where we are. you will feel like you will have some idea of what we're talking about and can come from an informed place when you are sharing your opinion with me. going back to the authentic place, having this be an authentic community, we are

really trying to participate and escrow questions. we are also trying to respond and react and use the audience and the users feedback. when we have users response to questions that have been posted, we go and response. this is where we took the information and we tell you what we did with it. providing the closure, providing the information that we read what we have to say, the information is there. i would add that i can is important to ask -- to really use the participants. i will give you an example where we are coming -- we are mostly social studies teachers at the national archives. will the prime resources and most of us have taught u.s. history.

that is where we stand. we're actually developing a math and science activity on the site. i have never taught math. what better way to get more information about how math teachers -- what tools to they want to use them to post it on there? in this case, we are authentically using disinformation from the community members because -- using this information from the committee members because we beat their input. we will certainly use it and hope to hear what you have to say and what kind of tools do math teachers want to say. i attended the open government and innovations conference a couple of months ago. i remember from that conference something that was echoed more than once.

when we're talking about engaging with the public, give the public something to do. not just have that, on what we are doing. we are trying to take that to heart, both on collaborate by asking educators to really do something, to provide us with their insight and to really help us design the new docsteach web site. on that particular site, in addition to helping come up with many of the ideas, the collaborate community, our goal is to have lots and lots of educators on that particular site with the tools they need to create lessons, the space to freight bill but lessons on the side and the ability to share with every other teacher there. in that sense, the teachers are doing and greeting the lessons and the site itself, the bulk of

it will be built by the collaboration of the teachers who come in and use the site. that is an overview of collaborate and what we're up to on the education team at the national archives. thank you for listening. question? >> it is obvious it is a .org. being transparent and open to the public, is it as good? you're keeping their personal identifiable into rising private. there are a whole lot of other things. even records management. does this become an official record? i am wondering if that motivated you to go with your partner association and go with the .org.?

were you trying to get around those things? >> the speed with which we did it had something to do with it, for sure. also just the size of the organization. in this case, this be affected it because there is a national archives web site called the digital balts.org which is posted on the server from the foundation. digitalvaults.org. we could get it up and running much more quickly. the foundation was much smaller -- was a much smaller agency and the whole government agency. docsteach will be a .org.

because of the process we're going through. we are looking into may be migrating to .gov, at some point. i certainly can't speak to al long. >> i work for a federal agency. >> a nameless federal agency. [laughter] >> this has become an issue, recently. we have a lot of things with various compliance people come down and say why we can have .org. other people are taking that and going off and doing their own thing. we are having trouble because when does it become an official nara web site? and can it be if it is .org?

people who work with me say, no. you were talking about making something happen in 30 days. >> right. >> i can't through a simple change request and 30 days. [laughter] are there people at nara who are higher up who are thinking about these things? years ago, when personalization was supposed to be the thing. but you cannot collect any information. how do i know it is you when you come to the website? you will sign in on every single page? how do we get past this thing and make things happen quickly and still do with the way we are supposed to? >> i think we are all in that effort together as far as how they gets figured out.

a lot of those conversations are going on now. in the meantime, we're going with .org and there are a lot of us in that both because of time and other things. we certainly follow, in :eydeveloping digital pulse and docsteach,x>f[>mxc:f compliance and regulations as far as usability and access. i think it is something that is being worked out now. unfortunately, i cannot provide a real concrete answer to that but banks. any other questions? >> what about the department of defense site pages put out? -- they just put out. does not have a regular ending.

i cannot remember exactly what it is. they have it where they can put twitter and everything else on it. [laughter] >> that is a good point. they built around defense.gov. on the .gov domain, they don't necessarily have as many security restrictions on the .mil. we are also part of the u.s. government. it was the way to put it altogether. it gives us an opportunity to get a website up. one of the requirements of the newer administration as well as some of our new leadership and to meet the other things that our standing leadership in an dod had already expressed an interest in. we were struggling how to do it. that seemed like the quickest way to make that happen.

>> any other questions on collaborate? or dod? one more? go ahead. >> i was wondering, if it is such an educational tool, is there some way you could use edu instead of .org or is that getting too far away from being a government site? >> to be honest, in this case, i was not involved in the creation of digital vaults. it is about consistency. it is about following along those lines of what has been done before. we have many, many teachers who use the digitalvaults.org in the classroom and many members of the general public that use it as well. it has been a successful

endeavor as far as user- friendly and user centered web site that has been developed. we want to keep that recognition and keep the consistency. >> can you give us a sense of the scope of participation? have you had a ton of our position? -- had to -- have you had a ton of participation? . you are looking for a strong level of participation? how has that been? >> i will go back to something you said at lunch, since we happened to be sitting at the same table. it is a different story now when you were talking about creating

committees and having communities online. i certainly feel a lot closer in a small group then i feel in a cue from the people. oftentimes, if i am thinking about my personal life, the advice i would take most of artists from the small group rather than from someone who offers me advice from a larger group. you had mentioned earlier that maybe we need to start looking at this a little bit different. is it not so much about the number of hits to collaborate as it is about the kind of feedback we get. i will hearken back to our audience. they are primarily educators and those involved in the education community and teaching and educating future educators. you really need to think about that community when you are

doing something like this. for instance, i do not expect to see many comments on collaborate for the next two weeks. i know that those educators are kind of busy right now. taking that into consideration, especially i had heard statistics at one point, i will not repeat them exactly, you have different groups of people that come to online sites. you have bet viewers, the watchers, the people who come and see and read but they do not ever see it -- ever say anything. they may be talking about what they read. they may be shared with colleagues. but we will not see that. it is still the government side. we are not tracking how many times people come and go and if they come back and i kind of

thing. you'll also have a much smaller group who are contributors and creators and who will go and provide information. we are really interested in very thoughtful commentary about how to teach, how to teach best. that takes a lot of thought. it takes a lot of time to compose a response. in this case, we are going for quality over quantity because after all, we're taking these ideas and wrapping them up and designing a brand new website that we hope thousands of educators use. we are certainly looking for quality and very thoughtful responses. we take the community and to mind. questions about collaborate or

the new site? i will give a brief mention of docsteach, the new website coming out. i'm excited about that, not only because it was created in this fashion with partnerships with educators all over the country but because it will create a community all its own. as i alluded to earlier, we plan to have tools on the site and teachers are helping us identify what kinds of tools teachers are looking for. to combine a set of tools and templates with the thousands of the digitized primary sources and records available at the national archives, excellent teaching tools, and giving teachers the ability to take the tools they want, pick the tools they want, pick the records or

the prime resources they want, and put them together and come -- in a completely customizable way. the real power of it will be to share that with educators all over the place, anyone who has access to this website. to be able to take what a colleague in montana or florida or new hampshire has done and use it or create your own new lesson plan from it will be a unique feature. it will create new community on docsteach, as well. we're looking forward to seeing that. >> one last question. you see that the workers are beginning to come users. -- ec that these lurkers are becoming users? as people are on the site, do

they become more comfortable answer to contribute? >> yes, i think it is important to post as much variety as possible. the people that come on this side who are reading and viewing, they might not just have something like a question that has been posed but they have strong feelings about certain subjects. something you post later, they might or might feel more comfortable. i think it is important to post a variety of questions about a variety of topics requiring a variety of answers. we don't want every answer to be an essay that someone needs to record sometimes, it should be yes or no because those cures are more likely to china and in that case. giving as many opportunities for participation as possible. >> please join me in thanking stephanie for her presentation. [applause] thank you. stephanie, on behalf of potomac

forum, we have a memento for you for your participation here at our symposium. thank you very much we will now take a short break, a 15 minute break. we invite you to visit -- a 20- minute break. we invite you to visit our exhibit area and to learn more about what our sponsors are doing pretty much returned here. we will start precisely at 5 minutes after 3:00. enjoy your break and we'll see you here in 15 minutes with carol and brubaker from microsoft. >> also, epa will talk about getting input from the public. it is something the admiral this morning alluded to and felt it was very important.

we will have a panel on best practices. thank you very much for your patience and we will see you in 20 minutes. that will give you extra time to get to to the refreshments and the sponsors. > [no audio] >> the potomac form discussion on the government and how to use

social media to get its message out will resume in about 20 minutes or so, a little bit after 3:00, eastern with discussions on regulation and best practices. we will have live coverage continuing here on c-span. senator ted kennedy died late last night at his home in hyannis port, mass., after a year-long battle with brain cancer at the age of 77. the family says tributes will be set up at the john f. kennedy presidential library in boston. news reports indicate that the late senator kennedy will be buried at arlington national cemetery. senator kennedy died late last night at the age of 77. in december, 2008, he received an honorary doctor of law degree from harvard university. after an introduction by the harvard university president, the senator spoke to the audience for about 12 minutes.

>> the hon. edward m. kennedy. [applause] you have to let me give him his degree and you could start all over again [laughter] ] let me begin by reading the

citation that accompanies the degree. "resolute in pursuit of opportunity for all, dauntless in sailing against the wind, a statesman for all seasons with a singular devotion to]! country, commonwealth, and the common good. by virtue of the authority delegated to me by the governing boards, i confer the honorary degree of doctor of laws on the senior united states senator from the commonwealth of massachusetts, edward m. kennedy. [applause]

>> thank you. thank you, very much. thank you. thank you, all right. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. thank you, ms. president and thank you steve breyer and thank you yoyo ma, and thank you for being here, joe biden, the vice- president-elect. [applause]

now, i have something in common with george washington. other than being born on february 22. it is not as i had once hoped, being president, it is the rare, rare privilege of receiving an honorary degree from harvard at a special convocation. [applause] i am moved and deeply grateful to my university. it was exactly 100 years ago, this september, that my father entered harvard college as a freshman to be followed in the

next generation by jack, joe, and bobby, and then by me. at home, here at harvard, which became a second home, i learned to price history, play football, and to believe in public service. it was long ago but i see it now as fresh as you'd and yesterday and i hope that in all the time since then, i have lived up to the chance that harvard gave to me. and along the way, i have also learned lessons in the school of life. that we should take yourself seriously but never take others too seriously. that political differences may make us opponents but should never make us enemies.

that battles rage and then quiet. of all, i have seen, throughout my life, how we, as a people, can rise to a challenge, embrace change, and renew our destiny. so there is no other time when i would rather receive this honor then this year, at this turning point in american history. [applause] just one month ago, our citizens powerfully reaffirm the promise of america. that promise has been crucial to my service and to the contributions of my brothers.

and to the age-old dreams of millions. long after lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation, long after brown vs. board of education, long after a young baptist minister stood on the steps of lincoln memorial and called the nation to the dream of equality, the moment is finally here. the time is now. the long march of progress has arrived at one extraordinary day in american history. [applause] week elected a 44 president, who by virtue of his race, would have been legally owned by 16

presidents of the united states, previously. we judge him as martin luther king said," not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character." and the capacity of his leadership. for america, this is not just a combination but a new beginning. because in barack obama, we will now have a president who offers, not just the audacity, but the possibility of hope, of one america, strong and prosperous, free to shining sea. [applause] i am proud to have played a small part in this giant part in

our history. and in the public life of our commonwealth and this country for so many years. 50 years ago, i managed the successful reelection campaign, with the junior senator from massachusetts, john f. kennedy and although i did not anticipated at the time, i myself have been deeply honored to hold the same seat he had for some 46 years. during my service in the united states senate, i have often been called a liberal and it usually was not meant to be a complement. [laughter] but i remember what my brother said about liberalism, shortly before he was elected president. he said," if by liberal, they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid

reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people, their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties, someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicion that grips us. if that is what they mean by a liberal, i am proud to be a liberal." [applause] i said in denver last summer, for me this is the season of hope. since i was a boy, i have known the joy of sailing the waters off cape cod. for all my years in public

life, i have believed that america must sail toward the shores of liberty and justice for all. no, there is no end to the journey. only the next great voyage. we know the future will outlast all lost. but i believe that all of us will live on in the future we make. in that spirit, i think harvard for this great honor and i think massachusetts for the privilege of serving its people and its principals. i have lived a blessed time. now, with you, i look forward to a new time of aspiration and high achievement for our nation and the world. thank you. [applause]

>> senator kennedy in december, 2008, at harvard. he died tuesday night in hyannis port, mass., at the age of 77. he was elected nine times to the u.s. senate. he will lie in repose in boston at the john f. kennedy presidential library and museum in boston thursday and friday and news reports indicate that the funeral mass will take place saturday at our lady of perpetual help in the mission hill area of boston with the burial at arlington national cemetery. earlier today, majority leader harry reid of the u.s. senate,

spoke to reporters in los angeles and commented on the death of senator kennedy. >> i spoke to vicki kennedy this morning. as we all know, ted died this morning. the kennedy family and the senate family have together lost a patriarch. my thoughts and prayers and those of the entire u.s. senate are with the kennedy, senator kennedy's children, is many nieces and nephews and the entire kennedy clan. it is what the highlights of my life to be able to work in the u.s. senate with ted kennedy. he was such a friend, a model of public service, and really an american icon.

at some money different times in kennedy family history, they called and turned it to their uncle ted for comfort. in some of the critical times in our country's history, america has turned to ted kennedy for that syncom for. -- that same comfort. i think we all remember waiting with the first lady of arlington national cemetery. i will never forget how his deep love for his brother, bobby, helped him somehow summoned the strength to deliver the defining eulogy. how as a patriarch, he agreed with us -- he grieved with the loss of john-john. he was the rock of the family and he will go into our history. he has left us to remember the

man who helped remember the lives of some of the others. is up to us to celebrate the center of so many have better lives. i have been a dot of the kennedys for a long time. as a student at utah state university, i formed the first young democrat club. i got a letter from president elect kennedy between the time that he had been elected and before he was inaugurated. he sent me this letter. i have stated all these years. when you come into my capitol office, there is that letter. it was very often that ted would come and look at that letter. .

more minorities, women and immigrants could realize the rights our founding fathers promised us. this man of wolet fought for this -- wealth fought for those less privileged. because of ted kennedy, more americans are proud of hour country. ted kennedy's america is one in which we could all pursue

justice and now freedom. of his life was driven by a neam that loved him. his dream was one in which the founding fathers fought and for which his three brothers died. the liberal lion's mighty roar i will always remember. we now fall silent, but his dream shall never die. i will be happy to take a few questions. >> you talked so much about his politics. can he tell us something that we don't know? >> people -- a lot of people have a tendency to believe that he was a bully, that he would just charge forward. just the opposite. he was a man who believed in compromise. legislation is the art of compromise. ted kennedy is the epitome of

what a legislator should do. he had beliefs. he is really a strong liberal and progressive, but all of his legislation does not have the mark of the liberal on it. he was willing to make deals to get it done. [inaudible] >> well, ted of course loved to come to nevada. the kennedies left-hand nevada. there are a lot of stories about his brother coming g hay day. his brother ted -- one of my proud accomplishments is helping save pyramid lake. john kennedy was fighting for that with his brothers many decades before i got involved in it. he was a popular man when he came here. in my early years, people used

to say this was a kennedy liberal, which was a way to kind of put it down. ted would be the last to tell you that i voted with him on everything. he came to nevada. he always drew big crowds. he had people who helped him financially and came here for fund-raising. i thought of this this morning. no one stepped out of their shoes to help me more than ted kennedy more on nuclear waste. yucca mountain is dead, but one of the reasons is people followed ted kennedy's lead. he knew it was important to me and good for the country, and he helped me a lot. he never batted an eye when the big utility companies were pressing him to vote against me. any other questions? thank you very much.

>> senate majority leader hear reid earlier today on the death yesterday of senator edward kennedy. we are coming back to the second message of date on how they are using social media to get its mental across. they are just getting underway live here on c-span. >> again, my name is art. i would like to welcome you back to the afternoon session and also a special welcome to our c-span viewers across the world. i'm very pleased to introduce our next speaker, a speaker who has a unique position in the government industry community. she was appointed by microsoft as the chief transition officer, and as far as i know,

she was the first chief transition officer appointed by any majork=5a9e in the country to align the corporate goals and objectives with that -- microsoft's goals and objectives with that of the new administration, a very challenging task, but shows microsoft's commitment to the federal government and understanding how they can relate and work together. we are very pleased that microsoft is our grand sponsor for today's and tomorrow's potomac forum government 2.0 symptom pose pose yum -- symposium. but we want to thank them. in addition to her role as transition officer, she is an expert on cont future of operations and other areas.

these are important areas as we read about the hh outbreak spreading across the world. it is important to under how gov 2.0 is play in the current administration's goals and objectives. we are here to learn more about that and enabling data to be an asset. join me with a big welcome for caroline, the chief transition officer for microsoft. welcome. [applause] >> thank you. that was a big introduction. thank you very much. thank all of you, too, for taking the time for being here today. i actually have a new title. i keep changing my title. it is part of job security. i did serve as transition officer. our top leadership said we

needed a pinnacle to collaborate all the changes going on and collaborate across the company. for a lot of that we used a lot of gov 2.0 technology. i want to get a complexion of the audience. how many are government attendees? >> great. how many of you are using twitters or sending feeds? wow. i looked on twitter and served pfgov and there is an enormous amount of traffic going out. what i'm going to talk about is a lot about gov 2.0. those are technologies that are helping the mission of government. so with some of the organizational changes, there is more expectation now to drive efficiencies within the

government agencies and for industry partners to kind of support some of these goals. these can be environmental efficiency as well as fiscal efficiencies, trying to do more with constrained budgets. creating jobs is a key goal nationally as we have all seen with the recovery act. so trying to free up resources, making our agencies work mork effectively and efficiently is key, and gov 2.0 can play a role there as well. facilitating innovation, i am going to talk a little about that. information sharing, some of the great collaboration technologies as secure developments that can help drive information across agencies. and then just generally improving citizen services. most of the citizens out there are used to facebook. they are used to amazon.com. they are used to many types of

technologies, and we don't necessarily have that same level of i guess user-friendly environments in some of the government agency collaboration suites. we will talk more about that and how we can leverage into the existing commercial areas. microsoft is trying to serve as a partner with the government agencies with our industry partners to help enable some of these goals. the other day -- i'm an after i had facebook fan, and i was on facebook, and i was asked for a friend request from my son's 6-year-old friend. i actually use it as a platform to do business and share personal information with my family literally spread across the world. but when you start to get invites from 6-year-old, things

have changed. so there are a lot of political objectives we have seen with the economic recovery initiatives. there are goals to change government, to make a more participatory government, to modernize government processes, to improve that experience for citizens and have citizens engaged in what is going on with government as well as to create more jobs and to reach environmental sustainability types of goals. so in order to do this, many key functions have to take place. broadening access to technology for those of you at the department of commerce, or usda, we have seen all the broadband grants and all the activity there. microsoft did play a key role working with some of the directors of broad bands in states to try to help get access to fund and set up community centers, trying to work on work force objectives. many of those work force

development type programs will have gov 2.0 type developments to them because you get a broader reach with what you are trying to do with the community. and then across all levels of government, federal, state, local, municipal and global, there is there new requirement for transparency. that is so government agencies can be more accountability. how many times have we heard the worth transparency today? i think hundreds by this point. years ago we weren't hearing that very often, but now it is part of an everyday type practice and what we are trying to drive to. one of the key things i want to touch on as a bottom bullet here on i.t. investments is delivering i.t. innovations. there is a little bit of risks, but i think with government

2.0s, it is a better way to shore up that risk. the more information shared in a secure environment, the better possibility that agencies will be able to innovate. gone are the days of the status quo and year-over-year project and program maintenance. now we are trying to go much beyond that into innovative practices and procedure;. microsoft is working closely with some of the innovative r and d type organizations in the federal government specifically, n.s.f., department of energy, n.i.h., on trying to do some cooperative story development. that is another key thing. a new trend starting to happening is industry is expected to have kind of a participatory seat at the table and jointly invest in some of the innovative goals that the new administration has. so there are many different aspects of business challenges

and technology solutions and what gov 2.0 can enable. two of the main ones i am going to focus be today are improving government worker productivity and citizens interaction. these are very interrelated, but they have some stand-alone goals and objectives. so with increasing government productivity, art had mentioned that i do a lot of work with coop planning and tele-work and had done quite a bit of that in my history with microsoft. one of the key goals of government productive is tele work, enabling employees to work at a distance. i know you have read things where he calls out the importance of work at a

distance. this isn't necessarily the on the mantra of working from home, but the ability to do any type of work from anywhere at any time. so that is a very key element of what we are trying to help enable through some of the technologies. work at a distance can be secured by having the right type of hardware, software, connectivity, connected together to be able to provide these types of communications. collaboration sites where you can share documents and reposstorse and be able to i'd fly people if they are on line and share information that is very key. this can really be done in different ways, but is something that go[v 2.0 does enable, taking this work at a distance to a new level. all of these factors do help reduce costs and can potentially support some environmental stewardship. so tele work or work as a

distance helps to minimize or diminish emissions. if everyone takes a look at the less time they spent on the road or traveling, on air fare traveling from point to point across the country, it helps to diminish the carbon footprint and the energy we all expend. it is another benefit to this gov 2.0 and productivity. going back to those expectations that citizens have now for technologies and user interface and how they are able to access information, gone are the days of the point, click and find. now the reality is that citizens are expected to engage, and want to engage in their government. so we are seeing some new initiatives and pilots where citizens can actually participate in policy

development. we have seen that with some of the national dialogue campaigns that the add stray has launched, and -- administration has launched, and we have seen that with specific objectives, where citizens can come in and have a dialogue with the government and make suggestions. with the recovery.gov process that was going on, there was a lot of ideas from the citizen community as to what that should look like, and that could not have been done without the gov 2.0 technology. this is the new mantra for how to reach citizens. here are some specific examples of the elements of government worker productivity. collaboration is key. one of the things i experienced working as the transition officer for microsoft is i collaborated in new ways with new people that i really had never met or never been exposed

to before both inside the company and outside the company. so generally i think we are seeing a lot of walls and barriers come down. with this new need and tech knowledge -- >> it is actually not that new, but used in other ways, but to give new ideas and broaden environments. i have usually kept my federal portfolio. sometimes i would veer into state and local. sometimes i would help a little bit in health care, depending on whatever the need was in the company. but there this past experience working especially on the stimulus activity, i was reaching people around the globe around the clock with some of these gov 2.0 technologies, which was important. it gave us the ability to do things much more efficiently and effectively. so using some specific

technology, unified communications gives you an awesome opportunity to see where your co-workers are, get a sense of their availability, when they are going to be able to participate and contribute, and gleen some ideas very dynamically. gone are the days are setting up meetings and conference calls as well because we are doing so much on line. and then work flow, especially with the grants processes that are going on in government right now, work flow is very important and intensive with what we are seeing in the agencies. my first job out of graduate school, and i am going to end updating myself, was as a grants manager monitor for the government. our work flow was through three-inch binders. we would go around and share the binders and put them on other people's desk.

if somebody was out that day, it sat on the desk, and nothing would happen. then the next day the person would exom in and have four or five binders to look through. when we went on the road, we had to have bags big enough to carry four or five binders. it was very difficult. i had a dolly just to carry my binders. now we are able to work more efficiently and effectively. we have come so far. but the commands are still fairly intense. applications just for the [2j broadband effort, watch the constraints that are happening at mtia, and r.u.s., the department of agriculture, the amount they are having to go through, it really is not even feasible without some type of collaborative work flow technology. it is something we can share as a community. it looks like most of you are from government, but sharing

those best practices, collaboration gives us the possibility to say from ntia to r.u.s., this is what we have found to work, and we are finding those two communities sharing work and processes and leveraging technologies to make it work better for both. that is wonderful. i did mention the environmental stewardship. the one thing we have done that is particularly important to highlight in terms of stewardship is in our education group. we do have a very robust education sector at microsoft. one of the things they have done is set up a school of the future in philadelphia that has really gotten outstanding achievement awards in many areas. it basically is a green school, and it has 100% green technology. they don't have text books. they don't have paper. it is an entirely paperless environment. what they are doing is actually setting up e-learning dialogues

with other schools. so leveraging the curriculum on line with our schools and sharing. it is great that the city of philadelphia has been so progressive, buts also wonderful that that chris mckendry la that is so -- curriculum is being shared with other schools across the country. they are learning from this experience themselves and taking advantage of that wonderful technology we source. talking again a little bit about citizen interaction. so improve citizen interaction. i had an experience over the summer where i was -- actually a very pleasant experience. we were on vacation, and i was with my 9-year-old son. we had a habit of going out on beach walks at 6:00 a.m. because he is an early reiser.

this was a couple of weeks ago down in florida. he noticed baby turtlesunder the bush. a mother had hatched all these baby turtles. i know this sound like an odd story, but it really does lead back to gov 2. there was one and two and others. now i have learned a lot about turtles from this experience. the mother lays the eggs, but they it literally hatch 100 to 200 eggs at a time. the mother had hatched the eggs, and the baby turtles were having trouble on south beach finding their way to the ocean, which is understandable. i go now what do we do? i had my hand-held with me. i went to usa.gov, which is a

good source of information. i ended up getting to the florida department of environmental stewardship or something like that, and they did an emergency call and sent someone to the beach in a pup truck and got all the turtles and took them to a safer place. i was thinking what would i have done if i didn't have any hand-held or didn't know about usa .gov. years ago that wouldn't have happened. we wouldn't have had the ability to find that information. we are trying to make that stronger for citizens, to have that engagement and connection with the community. they did actually take a picture of my son, and he was in some kind of local journal that evening, which was a thrill for us. with all of this information sharing and all of this great gov 2.0 technology, there is

some risk, and i know that is something we are all faced with, especially you in the government agencies, wanting to protect your data, wanting to make sure it is secure, wanting to make sure that the profit data remains private. so with all of these gov 2.0 planning and solutions, that has to be a core element of everything moving forward. so there are certain things, as i am sure all of you know, that the[ security certifications. that check list needs to be very compliant. that is one of the things that microsoft tries to do and stays on the forefront of. we work on the security councils and pac councils, trying to insure we have the most secure developments possible. i think nothing has made this more apparent than the flurry of cloud procurements and opportunities that are going on now. making sure if there is a

government cloud, that whatever the agency's requirement is for that data is met. ma agencies like the department of defense or d.h.s. have much more stringent security requirements than civilians agencies. so they have to insure that the privacy of the data is protected. i think that is most of what i wanted to go to. and then reporting and compliance. reporting and compliance, as you know, is one of the mainstays of government and some of the government responsibilities. every agency has its core mission, and to support that mission, they usually have to be compliant with some sort of reporting, either a policy mandate or reporting mandate that they have to prove they are meeting whatever that is. one of the things we have found most effectively -- is using business intelligence tools.

reporting back on compliance mandates is key, and that can be done in a variety of ways. pulling that information from different resources and pulling it together to insure the agencies are reporting all the compliance factors is important. there are more ways to share them with the gov 2.0 technologies. one of the key things i think is the presentation layer. after you have your rich analysis and your compliance reporting, how do you get those that need to know about it aware? and what can be shared? those are some of the key things we like to go through with the government abling says when they are putting this planning together. so you might not share everything, all your reports out to zips, for example, but finding those key things you want to highlights. we are seeing that many of the

agencies are starting to report their spend and the effectiveness of some of the fund they have released. making that impressive is taking that business intelligence information and putting that presentation layer on top of that to share that data. it can really take it to the next level. this is really more pick torle than anything else. i think microsoft is more focused on those on the left side. the government element is what we have talked about, but there are many key tuckses, you are faced with every day. every agency has records management, new requirements for rediscovery that need to be met. and then finance, budget and accounting, that has always

been a core aspect of business. some of the requirements for finance especially are becoming more stringent, with more reporting requirements. data center efficiency. many government agencies are modernizing and updating data centers. in is something we are trying to invest in with government. microsoft is working very closely and is about to open a center that is going to be mostly government data center, maybe all. i'm not quite sure yet, in the chicago region. so really trying to address some of the agency data center needs and some of the constraints and requirements they are facing and giving it a very targeted data center where they can keep their information. identity management. we talked a little bit about security and privacy, but this is kind of a core element. when you are sharing so much information, how can you make sure that the right people are getting the right access and

sharing the information as they are supposed to be? again, a lot of this is policy-driven, but if you don't have the right technologies, there is a lot of mishappen that can happen. and then government performance management, re have seen a lot of that of late, and i think we are only going to see more in the coming years. we have a government performance officer, the first time we have ever had that in the history of the government. many agencies are appointing their own performance officers. we have seen that with the state and local as well. the governors are starting to appoint performance officers. it is important to get that information and reporting that back to the citizens. the how behind a lot of this are government 2.0 technologies. what is the importance of government, what is the effectiveness, how are we reporting that, and then how is it being shared?

that is taking all of these elementing -- elements to the next level and will get us to where governments are trying to drive to. the next thing is the modernization efforts. many of you are faced with legacy systems. i know some of you are still on cobalt systems and others. a big modernization effort is underway. that can be a big challenge, trying to maintain the old system while trying to add the new technology. so having the right migration paths is a core element of what we are trying to do and how microsoft is trying to support business. and then infrastructure optimization. one of the things i have heard shared is the importance of infrastructure optimization and really making sure that the investment in the technologies are being used the way they can

be most optimum. and i think that is also one of the drivers of cloud technology. that is really sort of just my opinion more than anything else. but that is the way to really optimize the investment of the federal agencies. as long as you can meet your security and privacy restrictions and requirements. i know we are getting towards the end of the day. i may just leave it there. i am heap to take questions if any of you have questions. i have covered a lot of territory under the umbrella of government 2.0. if you want to hear how microsoft has done this, done it with other agencies or doing it globally, anything like that, i am happy to address at this time. i know it is the end of the day. yes, sir? >> what sort of tools does

microsoft have for collaboration? >> for a lot of our collaboration, we have share point. it has been out a while. share point 2007 is probably the one used most often in our government agencies. share point as an element on its own, and our dxm has quite a bit of work flow capability. we work with partners, and i see one here in the room from neighborhood america that has done quite a bit of work flow work for state and local agencies with data flow dynamics. yes, sir? >> are you looking at windows live, an element of an

enterprise solution? >> windows live can be an enterprise solution depending on the requirements of what you are trying to do. for search and find type things and windows sharing, that can be it. we have a lot of idea as to how to take that to the next level specifically for government. it is not finalized yet, but we are having discussions with bing, having a target bing .gov that would help leverage that windows type platform. we have had some discussions with the administration, but we are trying to figure out exactly what that would look like from a policy perspective mostly. >> for internal operations, share point is a good product. what about interaction and

engagement? does microsoft solutions have something that does the same thing? >> that is a good question. >> talking about internally. >> share point 2007 actually has that capability if it is designed the the right way. traditionally, though, i think the point you are probably getting to is share point is an excellent internal information -sharing collaboration type system, but has not been used in the external environment. moss 2007 has that capability. that is one of the things we are working on right now for some of these citizen interaction type solutions. there is one spsk i can talk to you about off line. the other thing is the presentation layer. some of our presentation technologies, including silver light has done well. i don't know if you have seen

that. it is not really a collaboration tool. it is more of a presentation tool that allows for video streaming. we used that for the inauguration, the olympics. i am trying to think of the most recent one. it was the cricket world cup. it can be used for video streaming as well as kind of dashboarding presentation type technologies. it is good for that. did anyone watch the cricket world cup? >> oh, you did? i wish i had a coin or something to give you. that is good. well, i know we are towards the end, so i wanted to thank everybody for your attention. i am happy to make the deck available. i will stick around if anyone has some specific questions. thank you so much. [applause] >> thank you very much for that great presentation. we have a small token, a

momento of appreciation for you. we thank you animosity for being the grand sponsor. we know the g.s.a., office of citizen services, we are pleased to note that they have another outreach to citizens. they will be very please birthday that, and we certainly thank you for being with us today. another thank you to them. [applause] >> thank you. >> our next presentation is very, very exciting. admiral thad allen, commandant of the coast guard, mentioned in his remarks this morning said that one of the biggest challenges he sees for the government is developing regulations and citizen involvement and outreach, being able to crown source, as it were, to ask opinion of the citizens and also get comments

for regulations and policy. he said that can't happen fast enough. well, when the admiral says things should happen fast, potomac forum respond. we have a meeting on a major area from the environmental protection agency, which is a leader in putting together information on getting citizen involvement and regulations. they have received many awards for their work in citizen involvement with policy and regulations, and we are very happy to have here with us today a policy analyst with the e.p.a. to talk about what wea is doing to ep -- e.p.a. is doing to ep game the public. join me with a big welcome for

our guest from the environmental protection agency. [applause] >> thank you very much. >> here we go. thank you. >> thank you. good afternoon. how are you? >> good. >> great. thanks for having me. as art mentioned, i'm here today to discuss our regulations[.gov exchange

project. it is something we formed in may of 2009, this spring. it was a very successful project. so i will walk you through the slides. permitting time, if you have questions, feel free into interrupt me. this shoob an interactive forum. i want to walk you through a little bit of the background because we do more than just manage the regulations dot golf website. and then i will walk you what we intended to do and then what we did. that was a lead-in to the regulations .gov overhaul that we at the end of july. our goal is to provide easy access and participation for the public in the rule making process. we have over 160 entities that are rule-making sources, and

they use seglations.gov to solicit comments on rule-making. some agencies use it for requests, freedom of information act, and freedom of information requests. it is a very big encompassing system that a lot of the federal agencies are using in its full capacity. or project started a while ago where the program management office was started in at one time. the first thing they did was design the portal. that was to allow citizens one-stop access to federal rule-making. at that time at the very beginning it was sort of an e-mail system where the public comments would come in, and we

would send them directly to the agencies to handle. soon after that we developed module two, a federal document management system where the agencies could manage the public comments on the back end and provide supporting materials that citizens and public members could use in order to educate themselves on the rule-making task at hand. this slide basically gives authorities that allowed us to operate, of course directing the agencies to support the regulations.gov website. our major milestones, like i mentioned before, we manage regulations.gov. and we manage for a document management system which is accessible to agencies only. we do a lot. i just want to say that. and for the regulations.gov exchange project, it is a very

small task compared to the things we do on an ongoing basis. in january of 2003 we launched the very first regulations.gov. we improveded site in 2005. in december of 2007, we ememployed a new search engine. we also streamlined the front end of the website so that users would not be so overwhelmed with the amount of information available on the site. we heard from a lot of citizens and public members that they needed more direction, and so we took an approach of useability studies and redesigned the website. and the regulations.gov exchange fit well in that past. in the last year we have done some enhancements to the system. one thing we have done is

upgraded the content management system. we upgraded that on the back end as well as the front end. again in may of 2009 we launched the regulations.gov exchange, an online forum. one thing we did was we provided the public users with an introductory video. that was our first experience in videotaping anything. i was pressured to be in that video. it was a short clip, but the goal of that clip was again to introduce the exchange, provide our purpose for the public and actually give them an action, give them something to do to invite them and have them feel like they were part of our project and other ongoing efforts to improve regulations .gov.

we built this platform. we used for the first time a free open tors tool. that was chove because there are some easy to implement modules that allowed for rating, polling, discussion threads. we entertained the idea of including a wickie. we took a few features that came with the droopl content manning system and moved forward. we included four discussion topics for the public to engage in a discussion with the program management office and also with each other. so the discussion threads not only allowed the public members to provide comments to us, but they were also able to discuss and provide comments on other

commenting that were previously submitted once they were submitted again, that circle-back feature. it included the regulations.gov features, and others. we allowed for the first time a download of regulatory data. we went to two of our partner agencies, noah was one agency, as well as the social security administration, and we allowed public members to youb load their docket-based information. that folder contains that rule-making activity. the public could get their hand on owl of that data, manipulate it in any way they would want. that data was already publicly available on the site, but it was the first time we allowed an actual data export on a public site. we also wanted to ask the question what can we do to enhance r.s.s.? we had r.s.s. available on the

site, but it was a very broad scope. so we wanted to figure out from the public what were their needs with that, how did they want to track regulatory information? and then the other feature was a regulations.gov profile. if you could customize that in any way you chose, how would you do that? what would you want available for you to do that? once again, we had these discussion sections. users were able to provide comments and discussion. we also for the first time deployed share links or social book marking. so throughout the site, users were also able to share a comment, facebook, other social medias there. again, this was some of the tails that i just went over. for the first time we also ememployed user profiles.

so anyone who provided a post or discussion points had to build a profile in[[ regulations .gov exchange. very simple information, first name, last name. we didn't go through steps to validate that because we didn't want to impact useability. again, the discussion threads, social book marking and the daily export. again, this was our first time with an online forum. we coordinated with the white house office of open government for this effort. they were very aware that we were going to propose this for our public members, and we wanted to get feedback and the publicity. they were very happy with the turn out. we participate inside a blog as well as their innovations

gallery. i have a few slides on that as well. within the program management office, the p.m.o., we developed a few fact sheets, questions and answers. we briefed our partner agencies on the effort and for the first time established our twitter page. so regulations.gov has a twitter page. we try our best to engage in that, but we are a small staff and very busy, so we are still improving our direct communications wi+h our twitter fans. again, we are housed within the environmental protection agency. it is the partner agency for the rule-making program. e.p.a. has a blog called greenversations. we had a blog for that portal as well. in the future we are planning

on providing a facebook page. i'm not sure when that is going to go, but hopefully before the end of the year. that is one other tool we are planning to use to keep communications with our public users. just a few statistics to go over. we actually had a total of 745 profiles on the regulations.gov exchange. that was a good metric for us. we were not anticipating that many user profiles on that site, so we were very happy with that number. 139 posts. did you have a question? [inaudible] >> it was required. it was required in order to provide a post or a discussion point. you could view anything without a profile. but in order to respond or interact with others, you needed to build a profile. 139 posts. and so a lot of -- with that

number, you would think a lot of the profile members did not end up making a post. they probably built that profile and then were able to see how people were responding and what the discussions were. maybe they felt they did or did not want to participate further. over 300,000 hits and over 130,000 page views. this is a screen shot of the innovations gallery and how we were featured on that on the white house.gov page. this is a photo, which i know it is hard to see, of our program director, john missouri . john moses did a video clip as well, going over our goals and accomplishments prior to the exchange. i want to take a moment to review the open government

initiative. the office of science and technology policy provided three phases where they actually asked the public to collaborate in order to really talk about a number of different topics. we were involved because one of those topics was rule-making and how to make that more effective and participatory for the public. the first thing we did was provided them with a blog post, and we actually managed the post. that was the first time we managed a post over a two-week or week and a half time frame. we encolluded topics on regulatory education, public involvement, how well do public members understand proposed actions? what does it really mean? what are some institutional changes that would improve the rule-making process? and how could we better increase public awareness?

increase public understanding of their role in the rule-making process. we got a lot of good feedback on that blog post as well. several comments focused on how to get the public more involved, the need for a one-stop access to rule-making process when it is first mentioned or thought about within the agency. how do you get the public more engaged in that and aware of what is going on so that in the very early stages while something is being developed and proposed, prior to the advance notice phase, the public can have feedback and collaboration with the government. also, the tools for that type of collaboration, whether or not we would include wickies or whether they would have blocks. what are the tombs that would allow the public to engage with

the federal government? and then there was a more than expected, i guess, for more searching document-based requests as well as tracking. for those who are already educated on the rule-making process, there was a defendant need to still have things docket-based so they could followkueát)át)r'g action from its beginning to its end. we heard that loud and clear. on the exchange we heard from users that r.s.f. feeds should be enhanced by agency, by[ topic, by docket. folks wanted to track in the docket and then search results. there was a need for interactive tools on regulations.gv. how can we better educate them with an interactive tool? personalization of

regulations.gov including custom settings. so somehow manipulating that home page for that user so they can get the information they need right way way once they log in, so sort of a version of my msn for that. also including other federal non-rule-making erts as well as state and local government user materials. we heard there was a need for that one-stop access point. again, improving our search and ememploying more social tools for online collaboration directly with the agencies, not necessarily the program management office, but allowing someone an access point where they can talk to e.p.a., d.o.t. or usda. overall we received positive feedback on the regulations.gov design and feature that were

proposed for future iterations. we unveiled a new look and feel for the site. when that was first launched on the site, we got a lot of great feedback for that. just an overview of what we heard. most comments came in the area of navigation and useability. again, this first pie chart looks at the exchange, and then the second pie chart views some of the comments coming in for the ostp blog. about 15 or so comments harped on the fact that we needed to do a better job of educating members on the rule-making process and establishing an outreach place for that. i just have a lot few slides with screen shots of the regular laces.gov overhaul. this was deployed at the very

end of july, july 25 in fact. it is a brand new look and feel. it is a streamlined view. we also wanted to bring some interactive functionality to the home page. so i will get to the next slide and sort of talk about that a little bit. some of the interactive icons on the home page allow public members to click, say if they want to submit a comment. that would automatically change the search so that only available documents for commenting that are open for comment would appear in their search results. again, trying to elite them in the direction where they come to the site, they quickly learn what the site is about and are able to identify some of the most common user tasks completed on our site. we also did a great job in working with our partner agencies in trying to establish more plain language text on the site. that is a big need for the

regulatory process, rule-making and nonrule-making. we worked very hard with our partner agencies in trying to bring forth more plain english text to describe information on the site. we did employ the r.s.s. by agency. what users told us they needed, this is one prime example of how we carried forth that need on the next iteration of regulations.gov. so it allowed us quick access and implementation to meet our user needs. we also ememployed social book marking. throughout the site, users are able to share information with their counterpart, with people who may know what is going on and people who may not know what is going on. in response to the july 25 imentplementation, we still heard more user feedback. what we have done, tomorrow

morning we are actually going to make more improvements on the site. that is a month. that is very, very quick for a first degree went. one big thing i want to point out is the release th+t we had in july allowed us to bring in tools that allow us to be very quick in reacting to our user needs, and we want to carry that forth. and we also want to continue encouraging public feedback. we have a contact us web forum on our site, and we listen to what our users are telling us. that is about it. any questions? [applause] >> i'm just curious. with all of the regulations, how do you -- and i'm sure you do -- comply with the old

federal register? if you are going to particularly be involved in rule-making, how does that work? >> agencies still have to.litsch their rule-making and nonrule-making efforts through the office of federal register. daily every morning we get a feed from o.f.r. we pull that information and display it on regulations.gov. on the back end, the document management system, the agency can then management the comments that are posted in response to the federal register documents. they can also upload supporting materials. so we work hand in hand with the office of federal register in insuring the information they collect is displayed efficiently and accurately on the website. . .[

they are closer to the impact and they are driving the audience interaction. the first question, the you ever talked about decentralized

architecture? secondly, do you have any plans or needs by which the agency gets back to the citizen and says here is how my feedback is considered in the actual process? that is one of the most critical success factors we can find and this is stimulating. >> right, absolutely. the first question, decentralized architecture. when we first designed our federal docket management system, we gave our opinion on decentralized architecture verses centralized. we saw more benefit with the centralized system, certainly in cost savings. if you have different agencies that deploy their own sites,

especially if they are deploying the back end, it is very very costly. this also allows the federal agencies to be somewhat consistent. if you go to regulations.gov, you will see a document summary that is agency specific. agencies can customize their comment forms to collect certain amount of data or display certain meta data. they can look at thaput up abst, keywords, dates, etc. from a cost savings standpoint and an efficiencies standpoint, it is clear that this brings more benefits to the picture. >> [inaudible]

they are our engagements that are every bit as cost-effective, i would argue more cost- effective. >> the second part of the question was the feedback loop. we have heard that. one thing that we do on our side is with every comment that comes in, there is a tracking number. public users can use that public tracking number when they communicate back with the agency cited within the federal registered document and they can ask if the comment has been processed. are you considering my comment? that is an initiation from the public user standpoint. i definitely see the need. you have heard that there is a better need for a feedback loop, specifically on regulations.gov,

how we can allow a user to track their comment. we have statices that indicate if something that has been reviewed or posted. thiallowing users to see that might be of benefit. to see how this played with in the final rule making, that is a little bit more complicated and certainly would require some policy changes on the part of the federal agencies. that is something we have heard before. a question in the back. >> you talked about bringing in some tools that enable you to respond to user feedback, can you elaborate on what those tools work? >> on the right hand, our system is documented. previously, we were using version 5.3, so we just

upgraded to 6.5. what happened previously on the power back and, we had meta data screens. regulations.gov would always have to start at that base. with the upgrade and then we employed a google web tool kit, this allowed us to be able to manage the front end very differently from the back end. this allows for a quicker response. for the exchange, we used a content management system because it had the features as far as rating, polling, discussion boards, etc.. we have talked about the ability to integrate that with regulations.gov. perhaps on the homepage

profiling that kind of thing. that is a little bit more long term but certainly we want to explore this for resources. >> an[inaudible] and for what portion of the information collection process? >> the question is, with the paperwork reduction act, we were asking the public to give us information, give us their feedback. we did develop an icr and we submitted this to omb and we got that approved. we outlined our mission for the exchange project, what we wanted to do. what features and functions were going to be included in the web site and then the expected outcome, specifically our

estimates of how long it would take the public members to go to the process and provide as their feedback. with the icr, this is a process in renewal. we'll have to keep that updated in order to keep the exchange project alive. i wanted to mention if i did not, we did have that exchange open until july 21st because we wanted to stop and be able to analyze and figure out what our public users wanted and needed. at a future date, we may deploy that exchange project again. this would have different topics to get more feedback. that is a long-range goal. >> how have you gotten the word out? >> we rely on our partner agencies quite a bit.

our governance structure, we have an executive steering committee which meets annually and then we have an advisory board committee which meets monthly. we have work groups. agency representatives from epa, the dot, usda, social security administration, commerce, all of the agencies participating in our work groups. through those members, we disseminate that information. with the exchange project, we use the epa office of public liaison said they have their own constituents and they reach out to the public. we reach out to the righwhite house. it was a lot of grassroots effort. we did not have a lot of money. we did not have a lot of public announcements. it was definitely grass roots, e-mail, distributing the fact sheets, twitter.

hopefully, we will have a facebook page at sin. -- page up soon. thank you very much. [applause] >> please accept this as a token of our appreciation for taking your time today. >> thank you. >> this is very exciting. this was very important. next i want to bring the speaker is up to participate in a panel discussion that will be moderated by important media analyst.

she is the author of "the social media adoption curve. we want her to help stimulate a conversation at the end of the date on where we are, what we need to do to develop more best transfixepractices. what can we do to spreads across the federal government. >> we heard some really great case studies, i was very impressed. they are equally amazing and our

speakers are terrific. hopefully, will continue a good discussion. >> i will have to take a phone call in a minute. i will be back. >> oh, man. i work with jack in the department of defense. >> we can get started. >> no problem. i suppose i will just keep standing. this is just a discussion, i would highly encourage everyone out there to ask questions. i will shepherd things along. i don't have a set agenda but i want to give everyone an opportunity to ask the questions that are important to them and learn from our panelists said that you can bring back good

information to your agencies. i will kick it off with the first question and then open it up a little bit more. the first thing i want to ask of you is -- i was impressed that all of the agencies practiced what they preach. they engaged citizens in the process of developing and public engagements solution. the thing that struck me about this is that there are two sides to this. it sounds like you have some really great feedback. from bloggers, teachers, a partner agencies. my background is in strategic innovation. what i have learned is that customers don't necessarily know everything.

the classic example is the yellow sony walkman from the 1980's. what was unique about that product and the development of that project is that sony solicited feedback from customers. they said, -- they did not have this product in mind, there are try to get information from customers. they asked the public, what do you need. they said, i really want to take my music with me. they were able to translate these customer needs into a product that met the needs the customer never could if articulated that they needed a yellow box that plays tapes and it has a radio. i don't know if customers are good that breaks your innovation thinking.

it is very easy to think about incremental thinking. little incremental innovations are easy for people to articulate in focus groups. big breakthrough innovations that involves a whole new industries are harder. while it is interesting to solicit input in the development of these solutions from the public, i wonder if it is and little bit of a catch-22. does that inhibit what the possibilities are? >> i will take this first because i have a call coming. one of the things i want to toss out there for discussion, because it was henry ford said if i had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse." we want to engage bloggers to understand what they need.

this is about thinking differently. you have to get in the informant to understand what a dramatic change that that environment has brought about amongst the american people. -- you have to git in the environment to understand. people communicate differently, and form themselves differently -- inform themselves differently. you do not understand this dynamic and to you roll up your sleeves and get amongst them. when theyou do, they will help. then you can help them devise things. >> if people in the audience want to jump in with examples, don't feel that only the panelists can answer. sometimes you have something on the tip of your timongue.

>> on regulations.gov, we had a platform where we invited users from what we thought were our major stakeholders. we invited a few of what we thought were our experts such as lobbyists or law firms that go to regulations.gov they lead to get updates on rulemaking activity. -- daily to get updates on will making activity. so, we thought that we were getting good feedback and what we learned from that was that we were limiting ourselves too much and we did not hear the larger voice from the standpoint of our online form -- did not hear the larger voice.

from the standpoint of our online form, we are hearing what our users need and want. we are giving them what they need to verses what they have said. the other thing we want to do is react. we don't think because we have deployed a new feature, if we get negative feedback, that is not a bad thing. that just means that we need to modify what we just gave them, go back to the drawing board a little bit, and enhance it. we want to keep our lines of communication very open so we can have a feedback loop. we heard from our users that they want this, that didn't work, let's continue to evolve. >> i would just add, hearing you describe the situation made me think that that is a great reason to have differing forces in the forum because you want

to get as many perspectives as possible. it shows the participants as well there are different people with different perspectives and different ideas about what to do. >> how do you motivate different people with different voices to participate and to provide feedback? the thing that i think about is that it is very hot to engage everyone in dialogue. people are busy, they are more busy than ever before. people still have families, jobs, hobbies, responsibilities. if this is someone's passion, if they are teachers who are extremely passinpassionate,

they will be engaged. you might not have thousands of teachers, you might have those in the tens's or 20's. if you are getting a broad enough perspective that is interesting to a larger audience or does that matter? >> i think that that matters but this is not the only place that you are getting information and input from. this is one source that you are getting information from. we are developing the website, we are not one to take only ideas that were carnage from the collaborator anwebsite. we havi will be at the learninge and some teachers will come up their.

-- we are not going to take only ideas that were given from the collaborator website. you take those opportunities when you can. this is not the only place that you want to get your information from. you want to get your information from our a variety of sources. >> there is leadership as well. leadership in this arena is about seeing whatever information that you get back and where that takes you and where you need to take your organization within that effort. getting the feedback is one thing, finding the other sources is another thing, this is never one-size-fits-all. the interesting thing about being in this type of environment is that you are really kind of conspicuous by your absence. when it is transparency, you are not responsible for your settlement. if there's something you need to add, you will be conspicuous by not being there. >> [inaudible]

there is a difference in the presence between twitter and facebook. you're giving the same amount of experience on each, i might get to% response from twitter and more from facebook. -- i might get 2% response from twitter and more from facebook. it is interesting to see where people in gauge. >> we don't have our facebook page at the moment. on twitter, we have our hands full quite a bit with participants that respond.

i've not seen the writing between the two. >> our facebook page is quite new. we are not sure where our visitors are coming from right now. >> the expectations of people using different social networks and social networking services are very different. i've learned this from personal experience. we get many more responses on things from twitter than the 21 facebook. >>-- than from facebook. >> [inaudible] you have to share that information and what is normal and not normal. >> a lot of times, the reason that we do the things that we do is to appoint people back to our web sites. wherever you are in gauging, they may or may not be as active

as other elements. -- wherever you are engaging. they want to come to you as the official source for the information. you might get five people from twitter or three from facebook but that is 8 people you have not engaged with before. >> this comes to the issue of quality versus quantity of comments and engagement. in terms of internal buy in and justifying your programs, people's orientation, especially when you're talking about the web is page hits, visitors. with social media, it is different. you're looking for quality. this is the discussion that you're having with the teacher in the hall but it is also on

line. this is very valuable information you have just harvested. how do you justify these programs to the senior leadership when the numbers are not tremendous? how are you measuring the success within your agencies? >> well, for the exchange project i mentioned the number of profiles that we have. that was a pretty large number, the number of post was very different. it is in situation where some people are interacting either for the first time in the discussion types thread or certainly they are interacting with us for the first time in that environment. so, as long as we can see feedback and the ability to react to that feedback for our governance structure, that is a success. if we are keeping them engage

and we are giving back what they ask for and we are able to react after that step, certainly we are not going about promoting our numbers. when the regulations.gov exchange launched, we launched at the same time as data.gov. we captured the feedback, reacted, then moved on. >> [inaudible] we have a responsibility to listen to the public. [inaudible]

i want to make sure that we don't get lost in the technology trend. it might be that the collaboration, they might report only 30% of our population. don't forget, looking to the older adults and it over to the teens, they're both interactive. my son does not read e-mail, they read text messages. at my age, we do e-mail. that is the point, we're getting to a different medium. the point is that we engage in national dialogue. we need to use multiple media. lee's fil

we use film, blogs. we need to engage them so that they can provide us with this feedback. [inaudible] [inaudible] we need to be really brought them looking now for responsibilities. -- abrobroad in looking for new responsibilities. >> has anyone heard of the 80-20

rule? if you get 20% of the population working, it is the decision of the leadership to say that this is different than the entire 100%. do we covered the and tire 80%? if the 20% is making the decision and the 80% is ok, you are doing the right thing. everyone is happy. if you are not doing the right thing, the other 80% will jump off. part of that is for leadership after. this is a facts based in vacation. -- this is an effects-based communication. i am communicating for an effect. what do i need to do to stay in the conversation, to create what i intended for my original conversation?

that is what we're looking at. it is not necessarily the numbers of press releases or the numbers of stories. is it having the affeffect that we need for the people and are we listening closely? >> we are still trying to expand our audience. one thing we have on our site is the american customer satisfaction index. we have part of our survey that talks about transparency, trustworthiness. we're asking the users how they feel about that and tell in addition to that, we want to

figure out how our users are tracking. do they want to receive more messaging through social networks or are they happy with e-mail? what is their comfort level as far as technology? we want to have some help responding to our audience. for us, it is the audience that we have right now, they're satisfied, but we have a mission to expand that audience and get more people involved. we are still moving down that path. we are identifying the need out there and who needs it. >> is anyone else have a question? >> [inaudible]

you are looking to generate a hypophysis. we do a lot of analysis. social media provides an amazing recess for getting into the minds of people and understanding what they think, how they feel, and how to me to them where they are. >> that's great, we appreciate that. >> i can show you numbers in the commercial setting, there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of engagement and feedback. this is product service delivery and so on. i'm wondering what we can do that means that kind of

engagement. i think there are things that we can do. are you able to make your sites novel, you need, interesting? in a commercial context, people to a network steady. are you given that the together freedom? do you have those resources? >> certainly, you do not. not really. we are challenged because the regulatory world, this is not the most exciting thing. it is sort of like how do you bring attention to it? how do you encourage people to really want to learn and be involved in a process that is displayeplagued by text on top f

text. this is very cumbersome. we don't have a lot of room to wiggle as far as what we can offer because we are under orders, basically, of what we can deliver. agencies are under orders of what they can provide to the public. on the purchasthis participatiod collaboration is fairly new. the open comment process itself, that is a collaborative. that engages the public. this feedback and engaging more people, that is pretty restrictive. we are add a point where we have to start to look at our policies. -- we are at a point where we have to start to look at our policies and what we have to offer in terms of public

engagement. we are pretty limited until we do this. >> that made me think of something else. this makes me wonder -- i am not sure that everyone is looking for the newest, coolest way to interact with the government, they are looking for the way they have been waiting to interact with the government. i am not thinking that everyone is going to be interested, that is the way it is. not everyone is interested. not everyone is interested in participating in regulations that are being made. to some extent, i think about it needs markets. i don't expect everyone to signup to post about how to create a website about teaching. the national archives recently launched another blog called

narrations which is about how to improve the public's online access to the national archive'' holdings. i know many members of the general public do get excited to go and see, when you go and look at that, you have some very involves comments -- involves commend comments because you hae people who use the national archives frequently. -- involved comments because you have people who use the national archives frequently. >> content is still king when you are working in a website for

a public continue. it should be esthetically pleasing but the most important thing, is intuitive? does it get people the information that they want? is it easy to navigate? is it into a dif? is it meeting that need? -- is the intuitive? we have been able to get to the feedback. is is getting you what you want or need? are we expecting everyone in the country to go to it? snow. but those better interested, we want to get back to. -- no. what do we need to do to make this better. >> everything we have been talking about is focusing on the mandate with transparency and everything is pointing towards the future. what are we doing for the people who are not anywhere remotely connected technologically, do not have an interest, did not

even know that there's a possibility that they could be interested and totally out of the loop? what about the people who always need the face-to-face interaction with us as government agencies? are they being left behind or are we still remembering that not everyone has access or even wants access to all of this technological information? >> i think so. a lot of the publication efforts are still out there. this is point back to getting official information published. -- this is going back to getting official information published. also, through the news media,

many journalists are using social networks -- what i said earlier in my presentation, it is about listening to whispers. you get the ability to pull the threads. it opens up others opportunities by opening up the public square. there are avenues that are out there. >> we all grew up in the broadcast era, with information coming down from a source. now, some of the things enable conversations to happen between people in a public square. you are building on one another's ideas. this is getting to a different level of value. i agree, the comfort zone of

more broadcasting, tell me where to go so i can just do this, is certainly still in need. >> i think it has the potential, technology to transform the culture in a small way. if you have decided that your agency is going to blog about everything that you were doing and to make this commitment to be transparent and the way that you are being transparent is to put it out through these avenues as it is happening rather than waiting until the project is completed or whatever it is. if we have already put it out on facebook, if you ask me about it, i can tell you. perhaps this is changing the culture in a sense that if it is getting out to their in one way, the face to pay -- if it is getting out there one way, the face-to-face interaction

is also there. >> [inaudible] 1 of the things we found out is that people were very concerned about the digital divide and still bridging that digital divide. we have an initiative to look at that and see what the various programs are doing and how we can improve access. they also have a program where we enlist public librarians to help people that come into the libraries to find information. this is very much an issue. the other thing that we're discovering is that local applications, smart phones, many people will not have a computer but they do have a cellphone. the ability to maybe use those devices to get information, perhaps this is a way [inaudible]

>> it is important to remember when we're talking about this, this is all an addition to, not a replacement for. this is in addition to so it makes a more robust and effective communication process as we move things forward. >> we have talked about technology, challenges, policies, not necessarily where they need to be but we have reasons the way they are. also the cultural challenges. policy, technology, culture, this is the trinity web 2.0. what has been the driver of those things? does culture drive policy or technology, is it being driven by the technology? houses played out in your

agencies? >> i think for us certainly, technology is the lead, the policies have to change to support the technology because the policies were in place in a paper-based process. those policies still govern but the technologies have changed drastically. to move forward with some of the collaborative tools and technologies, the policies will have to change. the culture is definitely lagging behind, so there is a pull to change the culture. this is especially from the standpoint of the agency where they know that they are responsible for reviewing each and every public comment that is given to them on a federal- registered document. how will they have to adapt to manage an influx of commons

given more enhanced technologies? -- an influx of commetnnts given more advance technologies? >> i think that the culture was a driving force because we were soliciting ideas before we grasp the technology to do so. in some ways, you take something that you were inclined to do and you rethink it because you are doing it in a different way. that might not have occurred to you until the technology came up. >> actually, there is another element that kind of drove the

intial spark which was a need. we had an immediate need to communicate. this first robust force technology. this then drove us into the cultural issues which are driving us towards policy changes. -- this first drove us towards technology. we have the guardian ethos, there is the knowledge that we need to communicate. in infantry training, you were taught shoot, move, communicate. you have to do this. what we are finding is that we had to fix the need to communicate. we needed to do this better and more quickly. that led us to the technology. the cultural issue was something

that was mentioned by some professors when they did the net assessment. they referred to this as the clay layer. they understood the power behind leadership and what this was doing to empower the leadership. the guys on the ground understood it as well. they now have the ability to communicate whenever, however, with whomever they need because they need to share. people were living and dined by day by what they could share throughout the day. -- people were living and dying by day by what they could share. if you look at how life altering warfare is, there is a lot of inertia in there. this is for a very good reason. that inertia has put a check on

some things. that is driving -- this is not necessarily the culture but to the inertia of the culture driving a policy need to look again at what we're doing. this is working just the way it was designed to. there's a need, we need to the need, we find the power, we see the value, we understand the risks, now we need to look at the policies. we need to meet the risk and train the forced to meet the threat and then it can move the culture forward. >> let's talk about where public engagement is going. we know where it is right now, is public engagement going to change? we cannot possibly predict this far into the future how are you within your agencies thinking about this or just personally? >> well, i certainly think that

it is on an upward path so we will see more areas where we want to engage the public. just from the exchange, i've talked with three different agencies about lessons learned with our project. there is a quick brainstorming on how they want to proceed with public engagement to improve their own websites. from the standpoint of including the public in decisions that the federal government is in the process of making, i definitely see that that will continue to move forward for the next several years probably. >> i certainly agree. we will see more and more. i wonder also, we at the national archives, on the research side of things, have hundreds of volunteers that give

hundreds of hours of their time a year to come in physically, personally, and to work on behalf of the national archives. besides engagement and suggestion, we might see work being done remotely from those people that are not physically in washington, d.c. we don't know what is going to come but we have some momentum. we might not have the same tools or done the same way, but if we're thinking differently, we're working different, learning differently. we will be able to adapt to meet those needs as things progress, as things move forward. that is kind of what the the issue is here. are we going to be a training organization or are we going to

be a learning organization? the quicker we can learn, the more robust we can learn, the better off we're going to be. whatever the tools happen to be. i've made this comment before, what these tools have allowed us to do are the things that we have done that make us human. the new tools allow us to do the most ancient of things, build a community. >> that's true. >> does anyone else have any questions? >> [inaudible] what if this works? what if we got it right, we got the right design, the right expectations, the right action,

which generated engagement. what if they get tens of thousands of comments, everything they do with interactions that is a big cultural change. -- everything they do with interactions? that is a big cultural change. >> on some of the projects, they are ready this religious depends on their goal. -- they are ready. this really depends on their goal. the federal government still fights with that profile of being a narrow, focused organization and we don't really care what you need, we will give you what we want -you want.

we want to give the public input to allow us to do this. that is an advantage. this helps us to get it right. quite frankly, we get tired of getting beat up. we say that you need this and you are not doing this. we hear this directly from our users and from third parties. we want to be able to say that we're listening and prove that we are listening. you give us feedback and we are reacting. for us, it is a way to be successful. >> i would like to answer a little bit. partly this is strategic medication. i go back to my college days, most small businesses fail not

because of poor business practices but because they did not plan to succeed. -- parlay this ist. partlypartlc communication. is your plan scalable? he should be planning for success. >> [inaudible] >> this is like this feedback loops we have been talking about. we have gone back and checked back in with people who have given comments. that is about discussion and collaboration. that is not just about you tell us and we are the big guys and you are just the citizens. ultimately, the government and

citizens, the government is comprised of the citizens. we and them is not the reality of america. >> remember, u.s. >> just another question or two. actually, one more question. i want to ask one more question about how much information to share with the public. there is a new world of transparency and that presidential memos and the way things are going with technology versus government agencies that have things that a secret for a reason, especially the department of defense. we apply tried and true public affairs practices to the new media. is anything that you apply

trying to be transparent cent? >> -- trying to be transparent? >> most agencies will take the time to review the comments before publishing it back out on regulations.gov. we deal with issues of personally identifiable information. and not only that, our federal document management system is a record-based system so we comply with all of the records requirements. we have to be very careful that we are not displaying information that should not be shared. agencies have a challenge in that with the influx of comments, that is our goal, to get more and more to the agencies but they need to be

able managing the revelation of those comments and safeguarding the ticket information. what we're doin-- and safeguardt particular information. we need to have a system that flags comments apparently need to track numbers in the sequence. -- we need a system that flax commentgts -- flags comments. we need to track the numbers in sequence. >> i am lucky enough to be working on a project for the

producers and the participants are also the end result users. we're not going to be leaking any personal information. on a day-to-day basis, we post and respond. we are certainly working with our public relations staff to deal with any information coming out of the agency. >> for the department of defense, we have the responsibility keep certain information to themselves. going back to good public affairs practices, ari fleischer had the greatest line i have heard in years. he was asked a question but he

said, you have every right to ask a question and i have ever responsibility not to answer. you have to know where that line is. if you do not, you need to find out. part of this is also about learning. how do we teach everyone? it's every soldiers going to be a spokesperson, how do we teach them to remain in their lane? >> i believe that we have to wrap up. thank you very much of the panel. we appreciate your comments and your presentation. thank you so much. [applause] >> please join me again in thanking our guests.

please join me again in thanking them. some folks have asked about future forum events and they asked that we share this information. over the next two months, we have an event focusing on a continuation of our social media series. we have a very important event which talks about the government preparing the government in responding for to the h1n1