The goal of our first developer day (perhaps even the first of its kind in government) was to further innovation in accessible technologies and foster citizen participation in open government. That event was well received by the developer community and many were eager for the next.
Naturally when we announced our next developer event, it was met with great excitement from the developer community and other federal agencies. The goal of the .Gov Developer Meet-Up was to expose the developer community to most of the .gov developer resources currently in production or launching in the next couple of months. “The approach today is much more of an organic nature. We really wanted to hit the meet-up style,” said Michael Byrne. We decided to go with a simple “meet-up” style event rather than a traditional code sprint because there was an expressed need for this kind of forum.
Although the FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski was unable to attend in person, he recorded video remarks which played during the first moments of the event. During his remarks he stated, “...you represent the right trend and in many ways the cutting edge in government data, finding new and novel ways to deliver transparency and greater openness.”
Steve VanRoekel, U.S. Federal Chief Information Officer gave opening remarks. He said, “At the end of the day in the area which you all live and think about from a developer standpoint, the innovative side of innovate really means how do we transform government and create government as a platform by which we will deliver new things and deliver new capabilities.” He went on to say, “We have a huge opportunity to bring agile and modular development into government in a way that delivers the solutions in a much different way taking the big solutions and breaking them down into the components by which we deliver services.”
We had 16 Federal Government agencies participate in this event, giving short 10 minute “ignite” style talks (presentations) centered around their API and Developer resources; over 5 dozen registered to attend; and over 500 watched online. This event was very successful and we’ll continue to promote open government initiatives and continue to foster the developer community by hosting events, providing more web services and sample code, and open sourcing more of our Drupal modules in addition to our Content API and SlashMaps modules.
The event was recorded and now available on the event page. Stay up-to-date on future FCC API deployment and/or updates, future events, and news related to the developer community, by signing up for our developer email list on https://www.fcc.gov/developer.