The US gov’t is on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, are you?

I received my old fashioned Learning TRENDS in the email inbox from Elliot Masie today – who says email is dead? – and he shared this interesting piece of information:

US CIO Shifts to Cloud Computing and Apps: Take a few minutes and look at a brand new government site: https://apps.gov

This was released this week by the US CIO, Vivek Kundra, as a way of pushing the Federal Government to start innovating with Cloud Computing, Thin Applications and Open Source Solutions.

For those people who think Web 2.0 is for high tech companies, boot-strapped entrepreneurs and “Gen Y”, this should be a wake-up call.  If the US government, not an entity that I think would take kindly to privacy breaches or security holes, is embracing cloud computing and Web 2.0, then I think many fears can be assauged.

They’ve got a nifty list of tools and a video on the home page explaining what cloud computing is (click the image to jump there).  I know that the US Army is using wikis and the entire military machine is using whatever technology at their disposal to increase their productivity.  Banks, also known for being pretty conservative are all over this: Capital City Savings in the US, Royal Bank here in Canada (although more for customer interaction by this post).  McKinsey has even done a study that shows how companies are using the tools.

I’m doing a couple of presentations on the topic of Web 2.0 for learning and support this fall.  If you are interested, you can sign up to this webinar.