Gadi Ben-Yehuda

• Using the Internet to Raise Money for Cities.  A few weeks ago, I wrote about "kickstarter for civic projects."  One site that's doing that, Citizinvestor, is off the ground, with five entries from three cities, including four petitions and only one project. Will it gain momentum?
• Using Data to Earn Money for Entrepreneurs.

Data is often compared to water: people talk about data purity, data flow, and of course, data leaks.

This week is all about innovation.

New college graduates entering the workforce this year may have gotten their first iPhone before they started college.  They may have gotten their first email address while they were in middle school.  While students who graduated from college even five years earlier were doing research on their laptops in dorm rooms, this year's graduates could fact-check their professors during their lectures on high-speed wireless networks using devices that weigh less than a bottle of water and fit surreptitiously in a pocket or purse.

• Start Your Engines! The White House announced the first round of Presidential Innovation Fellows.  Of particular interest to me are those working on the MyGov project, which has already launched an IdeaScale component.
• Now Get to Work! In related news, the White House has also open-sourced its "We the Peopl

Social media have been changing the way companies and government agencies operate since the middle of last decade--upending long-held ways of doing business and reshaping the relationship between government and citizens. Though more than 100 million Americans are members of a social media site like Facebook or Twitter, few government agencies have explicit policies for interacting through those platforms. Indeed, many are still in the process of developing clear guidelines for social media administrators, lawyers, public affairs officials.

Despite this annually-repeated Slate  magazine article, I love August.  In Washington, DC.  Where British officers and diplomats used to receive benefits and pay for Tropical Duty.

And this August, I have an extra reason to like this time--the panel picker for SXSW is open and I have an entry.  I've also seen some other great Gov 2.0 submissions which deserve your attention:

A virus that lives in only one kind of medium will not be terrifically successful.

The most dangerous--and thus successful--viruses can live in their host, where they replicate their own code, but also in media like air, water, and even other hosts in which they cannot replicate, but can hitch a ride from one ideal medium to the next.  That is true for viruses based on RNA, as well as those based on ones and zeros.

As in prior years,South by Southwest (SXSW, or just SX for initiates) is crowdsourcing their panel selection, and as in prior years, there is a host of Gov 2.0-related offerings.  Of the 3,123 proposals this year, 82 have been tagged as "Government or Citizen Engagement."  Those tagged include presentations on law, coding, public participation, open government/innovation, and news from the nexus of politics, technology, and social media.

This article is neither rebuttal nor follow-up of Cathryn Sloan’s “Why Every Social Media Manager Should Be Under 25,” but an investigation into the question “are today’s young professionals different than those entering the workforce 20 years ago.”