Request for Awesome.

I was lucky enough to spend last week at the Aspen Institute, attending the annual Forum on Communications and Society. Thirty-odd of us spent four days talking about how to make government more open and more innovative. The guest list will leave reasonable people wondering how I got invited—Madeline Albright, Toomas Hendrik Ilves (the President of Estonia), Esther Dyson, Reed Hundt (FCC Chairman under President Clinton), and Eric Schmidt (chairman of Google) were just some of the most famous attendees.

We broke into groups, and were assigned general topics on which to devise a proposal for how to make governance more open and innovative. I wound up in a group with Esther Dyson, Tim Hwang, Max Ogden, Christine Outram, David Robinson, and Christina Xu. We came up with some pretty great proposals, at least one of which I intend to pursue personally, but ultimately we settled on the need to overhaul the government RFP process, and to create a policy vehicle to bid out lightweight, low-dollar technical projects, and to attract bids from startups and other small, nimble tech organizations. The idea isn’t to replace the existing RFP process, but to create a parallel one that will enable government to be more nimble.

We call our proposal Request for Awesome, and it has been received enthusiastically. Two days after we announced our proposal, a half dozen cities had committed to implementing it, and no doubt more have rolled in in the week since. Max and Tim are particularly involved in pushing this forward, and I don’t doubt that they’ll spread this farther.

I was very impressed by the Aspen Institute and by the Forum on Communications and Society. I’ve probably been to a dozen conferences so far this year, and this one was head and shoulders above the rest, perhaps the best I’ve ever been to. The Aspen Institute enjoys a strong reputation, and now I see why. Here’s hoping I get invited back some day.