kid's allright

Earlier this spring, I received an incredibly interesting email from the folks within Yahoo! who handle our various interactions with the US Government. The Federal Government was starting to put together a series of “New Media Talks for Government” as part of a program called “Web Manager University” (see the upcoming schedule), and my government-focused colleagues at Yahoo! wanted me to participate in this program and provide an update on new things in Yahoo! product development that were relevant to government.

Over the next few months, I exchanged emails with and held a few conference calls with a handful of folks from the White House and the US General Services Administration to learn more about the program and about the topics that government employees might care to hear about from Yahoo!.

The New Media Talks for Government are open to any government employee or contractor with a government email address at all levels of government ranging from federal to state to local level. Learning about and embracing the newest technologies of the web is all part of an effort our government is undertaking to help make government in America more open and transparent — something that’s been a huge focus of the new Obama administration.

On August 6, I had the amazing opportunity to present Yahoo!’s open efforts to the program. I focused my talk primary on the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) and the Yahoo! Query Language (Y!QL) — using the former (YAP) to provide examples of how they can deliver consumer experiences into Yahoo! to help keep people informed on issues, and using the latter (YQL) to demonstrate how the government can leverage Yahoo! technology to help distribute rich government data out to developers and publishers in a more consumable format. I also touched a little on our Social APIs and Yahoo!’s participation in OpenID.

My talk was titled “Yahoo! Open Strategy & Government”. The dedicated WebContent.gov page for it (link) now has it available as a full audio webinar download (link), PDF download, and transcription — all available for anyone.

Or if you want to just flip through the slides that I presented, here you go:

Putting the presentation together helped me realize just how much impact opening up Yahoo! has not just on the Yahoo! consumer experience but also on the world. Helping government use the Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) to better enable open developer access to data from places like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, NASA, city and state budgets, etc, all can immensely help everyone around the world be more informed about so many things. Just look at all of the rich data on Data.gov and imagine if it were all even simpler for developers to query, leverage, and use in applications. And opening up Yahoo!’s consumer experience via the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) can help the government build apps to communicate directly with millions of people about issues of immediacy and importance such as natural disasters, health outbreaks, and so much more.

Preparing the talk really made me feel proud of the work I’m able to do at Yahoo!, and helped me see that I’m lucky to have such an opportunity; not every job brings with it the ability to make such an impact to the world. We’re building systems that can truly help make the world a better place in a very tangible way.

Cheers!
-c