An early look at FCW's Fall CIO Summit

FCW's Paul McClosey, Anne Armstrong, John Monroe and I are busy making plans for 23rd Semi-Annual Fall Government CIO Summit, which will be held November 11-13 at the Pointe South Mountain Resort in Phoenix, Ariz.

I only attended my first CIO Summit about two years ago, but they are really marvelous events. In part, that is because they are small, unlike so many of the government IT events. These are not swarming sessions with several thousand people. They actually provide us with the opportunity to talk about issues, something that I don't think happens nearly often enough.

So in my tenure at FCW's editor in chief, I have really worked to foster more of a link between FCW magazine and the Summits. I think our concept is to make the Summit is the government equivalent of those Sun Valley gatherings -- wonderful events where smart people can take a step (or a half-step) back from the 24/7 world and assess the state of the world -- both how it is and how it could be.

One of the overarching goals is to assess at the realm of the possible, which, I think, then has a great impact on the realm of what can be done today.

We had a really great spring Summit where we looked at Web 2.0 and what it means in the government world. We have tried to give you a glimpse of the kinds of things we discussed here with a Web audio slide presentation of one of the presentations at the Spring CIO Summit. It was by Chris Rasmussen, Knowledge Management Officer, Intellipedia, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense and he talked about what it's like to work as an Intellipedian, the rules they live by, and how the new tools are helping transform the ways of the intelligence-processing for good.

[More from the Spring CIO Summit: Federal Computer Week story wrapping up the conference, headlined Government taps the power of us; FCW Insider: Web 2.0 from the NYT's (and Summit speaker) David Pogue's viewpoint; FCW Insider: Wowed by Pogue; FCW Insider: An early take on the Summit agenda; FCW Insider: Government in a wiki world.]

Tomorrow, I'll share our topic for the upcoming Summit... and how you -- in a very Web 2.0 way -- can help develop the content.