One of my highlights of last month was attending “Here Comes Everybody: Boosting Economic Opportunity in the New Administration,” a policy hackathon held at the Washington, D.C. offices of Google, and co-hosted by ALA/American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) and the Internet Association.
The event was detailed in the recent ALA post “Partnering with Tech: Event brainstorms how libraries and the internet industry can collaborate to boost economic growth.” I was invited by my friend Alan Inouye, the ALA OITP Director, and met a number of interesting people, especially from Booz Allen Hamilton, several of whom participated in the hackathon. Booz Allen also had the winning policy proposal, in which each of the ten entrants from a variety of organizations presented, as noted by the ALA post, a “two-minute pitch in response to the original question: What proposals and partnerships should libraries and the internet industry initiate to enable opportunity for everybody?”