Must. Be. AWESOME!!!

A couple months ago, I told y’all about submitting a proposal to the Gov 2.0 Expo occurring in May. It is with glad jazz hands that I can tell you my proposal, “Instituting a Culture of AWESOME in Government,” was accepted by the Expo committee! I’m now listed as a speaker alongside some pretty frickin’ AWESOME company (like Gary V!).

As promised, I’m going to blog about this experience. It’s really the first time I’ve ever had the chance to analyze and put forth a case that’s totally unique (at least in my opinion), so I’m really excited about the opportunity. I am deep into collecting data for the case study, and one method I’m using to do this has been reaching out to former members of the IED Task Force Tech Team for stories, pictures, and other info that may help my analysis. It’s been a BLAST reconnecting with these guys. We had a lot of fun back in the Tech Team days, which is one cornerstone of that experience’s AWESOMEness.

I have gotten a crap-ton of fun stuff so far, a lot of which I hope makes it into the final preso. But to give you a tease, here is the first logo one of our Tech Team brethren, Shane Gilmore, cooked up back when we first went joint.

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• Instituting a Culture of AWESOME in Government (mustbeawesome.com)
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There’s been a slow, creeping movement in DC these past few years to renovate the way we think about government. The Gov 2.0 Summit and Expo, put on by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb, drew a monstrous crowd of people last year to explore challenges, requirements, and strategies for adapting the phenomena we associate with the social media movement to the government of the future.

I just submitted a Must.Be.AWESOME!!! pitch for the Gov 2.0 Expo in May 2010. My topic is called Instituting a Culture of AWESOME in Government. The approach I intend to take on this preso involves analyzing a case study of how  AWESOME can exist and flourish in government today. I chose to use a very specific case study, one near and dear to my own heart: my experience with the IED Task Force Tech Team from January 2003 to April 2006.

Du4 pretending to be King Shit at the old Tech Team trailer

My intent behind examining the Tech Team stems from the entire team’s own reminiscences about our time there. Not a single one of these exceptional people would tell you that working on this team was anything less than AWESOME. The team’s mission was to seek out, evaluate, and rapidly equip lifesaving counter-IED technology to American soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. There were long hours and a lot of opposition to our methods (our approach basically bucked and made irrelevant the entire Army acquisition system), but our cause was just and we celebrated it joyfully every day.

I’m really looking forward to digging into this study. It gives me a chance to catch up with a lot of my original teammates, all of whom left an indelible mark on me due to their profound professionalism and loyalty. I loved working with these guys, and I’d lay down in traffic for ‘em any day. That’s the kind of culture we need to instill in government today.

With some luck, my submission will get picked up by the Gov 2.0 folks, and I can get to work putting together a badass preso. I’ll blog about how it’s going as new developments occur; maybe something I’m looking into will help YOU in instituting a culture of AWESOME in your own organizations.