Great comment. Let me clarify -

This video is an answer to the question: “What does Gov 2.0 mean to you?”. The YOU part is really important.

For ME, I’m interested in how citizen-technologist are engaging government in new ways. We created http://www.appsfordemocracy.org to do just that.

This focus doesn’t mean I don’t care about ‘everybody else’. It’s just that ‘everybody else’ isn’t who I focus on on engaging – other people can and do do that.

It’s my role to get technologists more involved in this ‘government 2.0′ thing – therefore my video response.

That’s not what he said. (Play it again.)

I wish that he HAD said that it is about engaging citizens (meaning everyone; not just “citizen-technologists”) to participate and, therefore, improve, government decisionmaking.

That’s what Obama is saying in his memo on “Transparent and Open Government”.

He only mentions “new technologies” in one sentence .. and, even then, he doesn’t talk about anything other than putting more information “online”:

“Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.”

Of course, some of that “information” will be in the form of Data which can be made (with a new app) more useful to citizens and the government itself.

But there is PLENTY of valuable information (not data) that can be made available to citizens with EXISTING technology … it is just simply not online.

For example, there are 200 public notices requesting public comments, each one having to do with a project (like the new highway expansion near your house?) that is being proposed by a federal agency.

Almost none of them are published online. So it’s not lack of technology that holding us back. It’s been the government’s lack of will to be transparent.