Last weekend 115 folks from across the country (as well as Canada and the United Kingdom) gathered at the UIC Innovation Center in Chicago, IL for the inaugural CityCamp. The conference’s goal was to bring the Gov 2.0 movement to the local (read: municipal) level – and judging from the amount of tweets generated during the conference by the attendees, one could say that it was quite successful.
The two-day event was hosted by The Rockefeller Foundation and organized by a dedicated group of individuals that included Kevin Curry, Jen Pahlka, E-Democracy’s Steven Clift and O’Reilly Media’s Laurel Ruma. Virginia Beach, VA-based Curry took a few minutes to talk about how the conference came about and what motivated him to get involved.
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Attendees discussed issues ranging from Open Cities and Journalism to Jon Udell’s Elmcity project. The last session of the conference focused on the winners of the CityCamp Challenge, created by Code for America and GovLoop, that rewarded innovators of local government solutions with $500 scholarships to help them attend the conference. Winning solutions included Graffiti Tracker and SeeClickFix.
The conversations are still taking place days later with several action steps already under way. The organizers hope to allow more people to take advantage of the information and collaboration towards open data and open government through organizing similar events across the country this fall. Folks looking to join or follow the conversation may want to join the CityCamp Exchange list on E-Democracy or pay attention to the CityCamp Posterous site as well.
