For the last week or two, some of the Bitcurrent folks have been working with Visible Government on a fundraising campaign. Called Beers for Canada, the goal is to raise money to fund the creation of applications that link citizens to their governments.

I’m a board member of Visible Government, and I’m a strong believer that technology can eliminate much of the friction that often exists between citizenry and elected representatives. It’s our best bet at replacing hierarchies, a necessary evil of disconnected civilizations, with self-organization. This is a theme echoed by Clay Shirky and others.

There are three steps to this.

1. Make data free and open. This means encouraging governments to publish information on their activities in open, re-usable, freely licensed, properly archived formats.
2. Make the data accessible. This involves visualization, analytics, and easy, approachable interfaces that anyone can use.
3. Encourage everyone — both citizens and those they elect — to make use of these systems and change how government makes decisions.

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I wish I could be at Structure09 today, but the next best thing is their video feed. Kudos to Om and the team for pulling together a fantastic lineup of speakers and panels. Also, if you missed some of the content at Velocity, you can check out a number of recorded sessions on Blip.tv.

Here, through the magic of the Intertubes, is the Structure feed. You should also check out their coverage of the event today on Twitter.

What do you get when combine the traditional conference panel with Rockband and some hors d’œuvre?

You get some really great conversations.

Last night I attended a panel about social CRM, sponsored by Radian6 and moderated by Chris Brogan.   The panel was a conventional question and answer format with Chris Brogan roaming the audience and twitter for questions (you can follow some of the conversation by searching for #soccrm). What was a bit unconventional about the night was the power of the personalities on stage and the debate it inspired, online and off.

The major theme of the night was that it wasn’t about customer management anymore but engagement.  What was need they said wasn’t “Sales 2.0″ but “Helpful 1.0″.  Stories were shared about compelling human relationships between brands and people.

The panel also talked about how the term CRM was outdated but convenient.  Different names and acronyms were thrown around to better described the work that was being done with social media but in the end they pointed out that it was the work not the name that mattered.

The discussion recognized that with social media it was the customers that were managing the relationships now, not the other way around.  Paul Greenberg pointed out  that “Traditional CRM people are not realizing that the customer is in control now.”

The panel inspired a lot of side discussion and the real value of the night was meeting a ton of really smart people and having some good conversation (and wine).  I had great time and hope to see more interesting panel sessions like this in the future.

Finally finished the last presentation of this trip, starting with clouds at Enterprise 2.0, then picking on Community Gardeners, then the cloud equation, and now a quick overview of what web operators can glean from the rest of the company.

I got to Velocity this morning, and Jesse asked me if I wanted to get on stage for five minutes to talk before lunch. Given that I’m doing a session in the afternoon called What The Rest Of Your Company Knows About Your Website, I figured I should make something new.

One of the things that’s abundantly clear — echoed in presentations from Shopzilla, Google, and many other excellent speakers — is that performance matters. It affects your conversion rates; it even changes your Search Engine Marketing ranking (which was news to me.)

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I’m at Velocity in San Jose. Just got in last night, and I wish I could have been here for the whole thing. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is the biggest congregation of people who make the Internet work, in one place, for one subject. Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders, along with O’Reilly, get an amazing group of people together. Even the chat in the speaker room this morning was skimming the top of my forehead.

It actually feels like cloud computing and web monitoring are converging very quickly. It’s increasingly obvious that performance, user experience, and revenues are inextricably linked. Microsoft and Google covered this in a joint presentation yesterday, and by now, you’vep probably heard about the number of results Google shows. They tested the number of results that should be shown on the first results page, then tested them.

As Google’s VP of products Marissa Mayer points out, users wanted 30 results. But when they turned this on, they saw a 25% drop in searches on the site!

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Just finished a one-hour dash through web monitoring from a community manager’s point of view. The slides are available as a PDF; while this deck deals somewhat with the business of monitoring communities, it also looks at how to tie those communities back to business outcomes in analytics and how to take a more holistic approach.

Plus, it has my new favorite image of a community gardener in it. It’ll get me yelled at.  Here’s the deck.

We’ll have more stuff like this over at www.watchingwebsites.com.

We presented at Enterprise 2.0 today in Boston. It was an interesting day, with a three-hour session on the fundamentals of clouds and where they’ll be going, followed by three panels:

• End users from Linden Labs, Brainpark, Vertica, and Gilt
• Cloud operators from Joyent, Xcalibre, Intuit, and Terremark
• Next-gen platform and tool builders from Smart (Joyent), rPath, and Sonoa (unfortunately, Woody from Eucalyptus wasn’t able to join us)

The morning session was around 200 slides, with lots of new images and diagrams. We’ve posted it here (it’s around 80 MBytes.) As always, if you’re going to use some of this content, please provide attribution and a link back to Bitcurrent.

My friend Om Malik and the GigaOm crew have been hard at work on a few things. First, there’s the new GigaOm Pro, a paid offering that’s part analyst firm, part intrepid reporter, and part real-world clue-check. This is a good thing.

Done wrong, analyst firms can sometimes look like the protection rackets of the attention economy — a pay-to-play pact. This is a trap many traditional firms fall into; it’s inevitable that the biggest paying customers expect more love.

But a blog as an analyst firm has built-in honesty. The GigaOm crew has a pedigree of reporting that goes back to TV and print journalism, and anyone who reads Om knows he’s unflinchingly honest, even when that means breaking some glass. So GigaOm Pro looks like a refreshing change.

That’s not all GigaOm has been up to. Their Structure conference, now in its second year, is fast approaching. Last year, I helped with the conference and moderated some great panels — including one where Google was summarily attacked by a bunch of other cloud vendors for not being open. This was the first real debate on a subject that’s come to dominate cloud computing in the past year.

Which is typical GigaOm. Structure was ahead of its time last year — for example, while others were just talking about Green Computing, they brought in Jonathan Coomey to talk about his first-hand research.

So if you can make it to Structure 09, do so. The GigaOm folks passed along a discount code for Bitcurrent, so if you’re thinking of going, now you have no excuse; they sold out last year and likely will do so again.