I’m participating at the O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC this week, and it is amazing to see the people that the O’Reilly conference team has brought together, both in terms of speakers and participants. In the afternoon, WAMU radio host Kojo Nnamdi interviewed Macon Phillips, the White House Director of New Media, revealing that both had a handle on the technologies reshaping American politics and concepts of American civic actions.

For me, the quote of the day was this:

“Open source is the… best form of civic participation.” – Macon Phillips

But it was certainly not a quote out of context. Virtually every speaker (with one notable exception) either praised open source as being a transforming-and necessary-technology enabling “Gov 2.0”, or, even better, referenced it merely for the sake of completeness when also talking about open standards and open data. As an open source advocate, it is quite refreshing to see so much consensus on the topic that I can sit back and really focus on what people are doing with open source, rather than waiting for the right moment to give correction.

I look forward to hearing what the speakers have to say tomorrow!