Join us for a conversation with Jeanne Holm, evangelist for Data.gov and Chair of the e-Government Interest Group for the W3C.

Join us as we chat with Pia Waugh, organizer of September's GovCamp Australia, held in Canberra.

Tariq Khokhar joined the World Bank in June 2011 as its first Open Data Evangelist. Gov 2.0 Radio's Adriel Hampton and Allison Hornery talk with Tariq about cheerleading the global development organization's collaborations with technologists and data geeks around the world to accelerate its mission. His message to open data advocates: If you want to see more from the World Bank, use the data!

Steve Lunceford, Adriel Hampton and Allison Hornery talk with Bryan Sivak, new chief innovation officer for the State of Maryland, about innovating in government, and trying to keep a web-savvy citizenry up to speed during the recent DC-area earthquake and Hurricane Irene.

Photo by Kevin Shockey

Andrew LaMora from TopCoder joins Gov 2.0 Radio's Allison Hornery and Adriel Hampton to discuss coding challenges in partnership with NASA.

Dan Slee, my favorite gov Flickr user, has sparked a new group after finding none dedicated to local government. It's called "Local Government Does Some Brilliant Things." (That's one of Dan's photos from the new group, of the Walsall Library, above.)

Dan asks folks to join and submit their pics of local gov in action.

"Basically, it's pics of stuff with a local government connection. It's borough, district and parish. They may be shots of a park, a bit of countryside that's council owned, people emptying bins. Or even roads. Or new buildings. Or an event. Anything in fact."

Thanks, Dan! Expect my contributions posthaste.

Citizen media meets the Gov 2.0 movement:

• An education news and advocacy site features the authentic grassroots voices of parents, educators, and students on policies affecting public schools launches a citizen engagement project to revise the nation's omnibus education law, No Child Left Behind;
• Cool Mom Tech, a popular curator of apps and gadgets for tech-savvy women, highlights K12 News Network in in their Friday Picks.

K12 News Network has put NCLB (the Elementary and Secondary Education Act -- ESEA 2002) online in a searchable and commentable format. For this project, and K12NN's collaboration on a Google-maps based tool that showed the effect of an all-cuts budget on California school districts, K12NN CEO/Founder Cynthia Liu won the 2011 HTC Innovator Award at this year's BlogHer.com in San Diego.

“We were thrilled to have HTC as a Platinum sponsor at BlogHer ’11 this year, not only sponsoring our flagship Voices of the Year initiative, but introducing this new Innovator Award from our stage,” said Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder and COO of BlogHer, Inc. “We were looking for creativity and originality amongst the dozens of submissions, and we were so pleased to highlight one of the longtime members of our community with the Award.”

Receiving the award in front of the nation's 4,000 most web-savvy women was key because it's time for stakeholders to articulate what changes to NCLB should be made instead of simply letting the law's revision "happen" to parents of school-aged kids, said Liu. Early adopters at Cool Mom Tech and BlogHer will be the ones to make their voices heard first.

Liu will appear on Gov 2.0 radio sometime in September to discuss the details with Adriel Hampton and Allison Hornery and announce experts and partners.

K12 News Network was launched in January, 2011 and in addition to receiving the HTC Innovator Award, is also a Circle of Moms Top 25 Political Blog.

There's no shortage of news in intersection of technology, open government and society this month. Following are the the week's top stories from the Gov 2.0 channel of Govfresh, the open government blog that Luke Fretwell founded a little over two years ago. (Adriel knows it well, as a frequent contributor there himself. I'm glad to find he's opened up a community channel here at WiredToShare!)

• Apps for the Environment: Can developer and government talk?
• Jennifer Pahlka: Do more than leave or speak up. Make open government work better.
• Pew: Search and email are nearly universal among adult Internet users
• ExpertLabs: The future of open government is citizen-focused
• Health 2.0: Todd Park talks about open data and healthcare at NYC Hacks and Hackers
• Notes from the third White House Open Government Partnership consultation
• Kundra: Closing the IT gap is the key to making government work better for the American people
• Carmi Levy: open government is about leveraging technology and citizens to do more with less
• Department of Veterans Affairs releases progressive, structured social media policy

Keep an eye out on the Gov 2.0 channel of the O'Reilly Radar  tomorrow, where we'll be publishing a new feature story on open government and open data in Chicago.

-Alex Howard

Join Allison Hornery and Adriel Hampton for a chat with Kristy Fifelski, of GovGirl.com and Reno.gov. Kristy shares about Reno's planned inaugural civic hackathon, her GovGirl video series, the upcoming National Association of Government Webmasters conference, and the new NV.gov.

Nicholas Skytland is NASAs program manager for the Open Government Initiative. Adriel Hampton and Allison Hornery talk to him about open government and NASAs public participation and innovation programs.