Alan W. Silberberg

I have been following closely the debate surrounding the FDA's call to regulate apps like you use on your smartphone as a device, like a heart monitor or diabetes test kit.

Is this the right thing to do? I am all for regulation of industries to ensure safety and make...

Counting down the days now, literally and getting excited to see it unfold. As the founder, I am both humbled and quite proud at the same time. Gov 2.0 and Open Government are blossoming...

Is that an apple?

I was in a meeting recently, and one of the principals in the meeting was making some points about lack of education here in U.S. He made a point of discussing how in a school in West Virginia, a famous TV personality did a test. He...

As the 3rd annual Gov 2.0 L.A. (Gov20LA) approaches on April 21, 2012, I have been thinking a lot about why I started this conference and what it means for you, for me and for our futures. A few years back I wrote this piece "What is Gov20LA...

www.gov20la.com

The speaker list for Gov 2.0 L.A. 2012 is out:

@nigelcameron Nigel Cameron
thinking | speaking | tweeting | blogging || future | tech | policy | values || c-pet.org | nigelcameron.org ||

@Jon_Ferrara Jon...

Election 2012 was either supposed to be about someone beating Obama or Obama beating someone. That part of the story is still being told. However the sub-story of Election 2012 is not which GOP candidate got a "surge." Surge. That word -- each time I heard the word "surge" I...

The third Gov20LA is coming up soon. In fact in April of 2012 at the same location as this year.

As we have in the last two years, the event will be fully live-streamed and interactive with Twitter, Facebook and chat.

We are past the point where...

Change is here. It is happening everywhere. I have been fortunate in the last few months to speak and also do a tremendous amount of listening and asking pertinent questions of minister level officials in 5 national capitals, on 4 continents. The pace of change in government use and implementation...

Remember those old AOL commercials on TV, the "You've got mail" campaign? It was wildly successful as a marketing slogan, as a commercial, and even as the title of a movie.

Times change. Social media is no longer just a buzzword, but really a part of daily...

My business partner and I were in meetings this week with a government agency dealing with the sudden onslaught of "Gov 2.0." Deja Vu. It came full blast this week from the year 2008. We might as well have been in an episode of the TV show Fear Factor as...

Anna Hazare. The name sounds like an exotic woman; maybe the name of some foreign thriller in the movie house. But it is actually a man, who may be at the center of one of the largest citizen movements in recorded history. India is awash with civil dissent right...

Social media is a two-edged sword. During mid-2009, in the throes of the Iranian election in the midst of a hot summer, we witnessed the beginnings of social media being used actively as a weapon against the people. Since that time, repression after repression has happened in country after country...

Why Social Media Fails Sometimes - Somalia in point.

Horrifying: 29,000 children under the age of 5 dead in the last 90 days alone in Somalia. 29,000 children, who most of us using social media have heard little about.

Why is it that social media becomes the tool of...

We are rushing into a world of social awareness, social politics, and social media entering almost any facet of our lives. But there is no gatekeeper yet. The lack of gatekeepers is enabling fake social media accounts to be set up, maintained and used in ways from just annoying, to...

This was co-written by Alan W. Silberberg and Julianne Shinto

The word memory evokes many things, different for each of us. In the digital age, memory has a double meaning, sometimes even more. There is cultural memory, there is institutional memory and then there is the collective global memory of...

Quick, do something fast! Your house is on fire! Dial 911, get everyone out and wait for the firefighters to come rescue you. That is, at least, what we in the United States have been brought up to do. In 2011, you may have to keep waiting, waiting, and waiting...

Politics seems to be in everything now. Whether it is your home loan, your school loan; even your reproductive rights or the right to bear arms. Believe it or not, it is now in Gov 2.0 and transparency in government. The United States is faced with an extraordinary amount...

Osama Bin Laden Dead.
First reported on social media.

People singing the national anthem in front of the U.S. White House is an occurrence that happens more than people realize, but it is usually part of some organized protest. Rarely, if ever, does it happen spontaneously like...

I have just been on 10 airplanes over the course of 11 days. I was in seven different airports, each with stores, restaurants, etc. I have been in countless cabs and other forms of transportation between airports, meetings. All this frenzied travel had nothing whatsoever to do with customer service,...

March 2011 will always mark a powerful event in our lives. Japan experienced an unprecedented triple disaster, the uber-powerful 9.0 magnitude earthquake, then the historic sized tsunami, then the still ongoing nuclear disaster, with a near miss on that one looking more and more likely.

But we also saw...