Bringing together members of the government  as well as representatives from the technology and communications industries, this past Tuesday’s FedTalks 2010 conference in Washington D.C. was a success both on-line and offline.

If you didn’t catch our live tweeting the event from @bivings, check out the latest instance of Slurp140 we created specifically for Fedtalks 2010!

Speaking to the challenges of communicating in a large hierarchal organization, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark pointed out that "People in the rank and file in any organization know how to get things done… What they need is a way to get that information to the boss."  How should one do that? Craig somewhat joking suggested that the answer was to look for the ‘Alpha Dilberts’ or those "who have risen to important positions and reminding them why they are there." 

Addressing the scale of digitalizing health records, Capt. Michael Weiner informed us that the DOD has over 70 terabytes of non-image data with over 140,000 new records being added every day.

Have you ever downloaded a computer virus? If so, don’t beat yourself up too much, as we learned that even one of Symantec’s V.P’s was phished, and nearly feel victim to a message from a friend’s Facebook account.

Open-source development can pay some incredible dividends, as Peter Corbett informed us that when given the opportunity, soldiers in the U.S. Army responded to an application development contest by creating 53 apps in 75 days. One of which tracked and instantly shared the location of recently exploded IED’s in Iraq.

President Obama knows how to reboot a laptop and install a Firefox plug-in.

By far, the biggest buzz-word of the conference was "data". Whether it be the MilWikipedia utilized by the DOD to share data and expertise amongst solders, or data.gov- the current administration’s initiative to engage the American people in applications data use. Representatives from NASA talked about the sheer volume of data that is created every day across the government bureaucratic space – and the need to make that data secure while still allowing employees to access it as they see fit. Both the private and public sector focused on the notion of "scalability" – or creating a system for a large government agency that can also be used for a small agency, or even an inter-governmental task force.

Below is one of the graphs generated by SLURP140 during the conference. Comparing the spikes in traffic to the agenda, the panels that generated the most discussion were the Open Government Keynote by Andrew McLaughlin, U.S. Deputy CTO and  the conversation between Craig Newmark & Christopher Doroberk of Federal News Radio. In a close second were two of the afternoon panels featuring a presentation by Peter Corbett of IStrategy Labs on Crowd-Sourcing and Government Innovation and a discussion between Rep. Jim Moran (VA-8th) and Fred Humphries, V.P. of Government Affairs for Microsoft on how technology in Congress.

Overall, the volume on conversation on Twitter remained steady throughout the day, and finished with a total of  2,681 tweets by 873 people.