"Social media is like stages of grief. Everyone goes through denial and anger at first, it seems," says Josh Salmons, Staff Sergeant at the Defense Information School. This year began with a gathering of about 250 government employees who were not at all grieving over social media. They were celebrating it.

The occasion was the second in an ongoing series of conferences on the Open Government Directive (OGD). In fact, even before the morning coffee kicked in, attendees traded ideas for how to make their agencies more transparent, participatory and collaborative. These three principles, wrote Peter Orzag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, "form the cornerstone of an open government."

On the first full day of the Obama administration, the Commander in Chief issued a Presidential Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. "Openness," wrote Obama, "will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government."

January's OpenGov conference began with inter-agency panels, continued with five-minute presentations of what directives certain offices have accomplished so far, and concluded with collaborative workshop sessions. In the spirit of openness, everyone was encouraged to post their notes to the website; Chris Golden of MyImpact.org live-Tweeted the session and the Twitter tag #opengovpb flashed participants' new entries on flatscreen monitors along the side aisles. Everyone was plugged in.

OhMyGov! followed up with Salmons after the conference. While he says he isn't working in direct support of the OGD, he did share a sampling of objectives he has worked on for the past few years. His team helped develop course content to teach military students about what social media is and how it should be adopted into normal operations. Salmons and his cohorts then "launched communities of practice framed within social networks and wikis to collaborate and transfer knowledge between employees." Additionally, he says he "authored distance-learning teaching methods through collaborative tools like Defense Connect Online (Adobe Connect) so that public affairs professionals throughout DOD can log in and participate, without the costs of flying to be here physically."

Of his efforts, Salmons says, "It takes careful planning and diligence to establish the mechanisms to motivate people. This is especially true for government workers, who are typically not worried about quarterly earnings and competition."

Resistance to change is nothing new, but forming proper motivational mechanisms regularly requires novel thinking. During the conference, representatives from a host of government agencies presented their creative approaches to fulfilling the Open Government Directive.

Kirsten Burgard of the Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, spoke of a new URL shortener (like TinyURL) specifically for government websites. She noted that it is, "part of the whole piece of the puzzle...of citizen engagement." Indeed, she encouraged engagement from all in the form of playing on Drupal, an open source web platform. Burgard's group used the Drupal platform to set up go.usa.gov - which is only open to government employees in the current beta testing stage - to create "trustworthy, branded .gov URLs." The benefits of this include forming communities through social media use, ensuring authenticity of government links, and the ease of gathering web metrics data.

Speaking on behalf of the Department of Transportation, the host agency for the conference, Adam Schlicht explained how his office developed and is currently using Transportation Nation. This program is a "Second Life-based virtual island," according to Schlicht's presentation, where agency employees from around the country can use avatars (online representations of users - not blue alien creatures) from their desktop for training and information sharing purposes. He notes that other agencies are using virtual world programs as online meeting places. Transportation Nation is, Schilcht says, is "really interesting, really dynamic, really fresh. It's a new way of looking at government information and sharing it not only with our employees, but participation certainly with the public."

The OGD initiatives of Salmons, Burgard and Schlicht all work toward the goals of making their government agencies more transparent, participatory and collaborative. While the deadlines of 45, 60 and 120 days to present agency progress may seem daunting, the good news is that all of the information from the first two OGD workshops can be found on the OpenGov Playbook site. The next meeting will be held on February 17; participants are asked to sign up by February 9.

The Open Government Directive aims to change the very culture of government from one of shadowy secrecy to one of, well, openness. The January OGD workshop generated more questions than answers, but in a spirit of curiosity and growth. Salmons, like most others, has concerns about the ability of the directive to truly change operations.

Salmons says, "If an initiative does not add value to a person's life, be it in the workplace or at home, it will be ignored. People have enough distractions and time commitments. I do wonder how the OGD will lead to genuine civic participation, rather than adding another chore for agencies to tend." But, he continues, "As that culture slowly changes, the ripples spread.... So my coworkers are initially resistant, but usually come around when they discover the value in things."

The OGD requires all government agencies to take concrete steps toward an open government. The OpenGov workshops demonstrate that the value of community to leverage change can create a more efficient environment - as long as the agencies keep communicating.