Chris, Glad to hear from you. Have been following your work. Was planning to reach out in connection with the upcoming corporate planning meeting and the one we are planning for London. Would like to understand better the work you are doing and how it compares to other projects under way. If we can pack up our toys, I'll be thrilled. Shoot me a line via email or skype so we can arrange an opportunity to talk.

David, Thanks for your very helpful comments. EPA has really been out in front on this issue with people participating both in the Sloan and the upcoming Sunlight workshops. Are you in touch with your open gov team there? If you ping me via email or skype, I'll be happy to connect you, if you aren't already.

You are right that there were familiar faces present because the conference needed people who have been practicing public sector innovation to present their work to the researchers whom you didn't recognize. There have been many open gov events before but never an event focused on research. David Stark, professor of sociology at Columbia, who studies the impact of technology on organizations has never attended an open gov conference. Noshir Contractor, Director of the Science of Networks in Communities Research Group at Northwestern University, is one of the preeminent thinkers on network science, and is well poised to translate the problems he heard from the usual suspects back to his community that knows nothing about them. Cary Coglianese, professor of law and political science at Penn, is a traditional administrative law expert with an interest in studying the impact of technology on the administrative state. Whereas he reads about open gov, he hasn't interacted with some of the new public sector innovators. More importantly, there were grad students in the room (not enough) who were there to get ideas for dissertations and theses. Hackathons don't substitute for inviting researchers -- who have never been addressed -- to start studying what's working and what's not in order to free up people like you (and I hope me, too) to innovate and try great new experiments and to inform our work. But it's not enough to have just the academics without the practitioners and vice versa. Having a Washington kick-off was important but the next R&D workshop will be in Albany with a new and expanded cast of characters and without the distraction of blackberries luring people out of the room. Instead, we'll have two days to flesh out the research agenda on transparency.