With that, all several hundred attendees and sponsors spent the next hour and a half proposing breakout sessions and introducing themselves to one by one -- with all of three words to sum up their interests, expertise or reasons for showing up.
Here's a telling selection of a few dozen of those brief intros (the words are unedited, but the order below is mine)....
"lots to learn"
"leveraging the tools"
"leveraging each other"
"making data social"
"give data away"
"location based conversation"
"shouldn't cost millions"
"open source adoption"
"let's bash Vista"
"firewall? what firewall?"
"low hanging fruit"
"should be easy"
"making it simple"
"breaking the rules"
"doing it legally"
"changing agency attitudes"
"sick of excuses"
"bosses almost understand"
"no no no"
"I am excited"
"so far behind"
"social media ninja"
"we wear capes"
"we serve you"
"citizens are government"
"need government job"
"up for hire"
"we are hiring"
"journalist, still employed"
"need story ideas"
"Arizona time, tired"
"my thumbs hurt"
"where's the bar"
"nothing to add"
"I'm already inspired"
The discussions over the next two days will be moving just as fast. But since this is the kind of event where plenty of people have written their Twitter @names on their "Hello, My Name Is" stickers, the easiest way to follow what's going on is via the "tweets" posted by attendees.
You can monitor those short, rapid-fire messages on Twitter using the #gov20camp tag. The organizers also urged the unconference-goers to post relevant information, blog posts and images on the wiki linked up at the top of this entry.