GovCon 2.0 is the practice of winning government contracts (i.e. government contracting) utilizing both tried and proven methods developed over decades and Web 2.0 tools and resources to gain a competitive edge.

To better understand where the term “GovCon 2.0″ came from it’s helpful to look at the term “Web 2.0″ and what it means.

Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 this way:

“Web 2.0” refers to web development and web design that facilitates interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them. Wikipedia: Web 2.0

So according to this definition Web 2.0 is all about developing Websites that are interactive allowing for the sharing of information, collaboration, and interoperability. This sounds nothing like the “brochure” Websites that dominate the Web today. But there are exceptions, which we will highlight in the days ahead.

The examples given in the description on Wikipedia include: (We’ve added brief definitions to assist those who are aren’t as familiar with Web 2.0 and the terms used.)

• Online communities: An online community is a group of people that primarily interact via an internet social network service or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other primarily in real life. Many means are used in social software separately or in combination, including text-based chatrooms and forums that use voice, video text or avatars. Significant socio-technical change may have resulted from the proliferation of such Internet-based social networks.

• Hosted services: A Web Service (also Webservice) is defined by the W3C as “a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP-messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards.”

• Web applications: In software engineering, a web application or webapp is an application that is accessed via a web browser over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. It is also a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language (such as HTML, JavaScript, Java, etc.) and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.

• Social-networking sites: A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

• Video-sharing sites

• Wikis: The word “wiki” is a Hawaiian word for “fast”. A wiki is a website that uses wiki software, allowing the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked Web pages, using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor, within the browser. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and in knowledge management systems.

• Blogs

• Mashups: In web development, a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open APIs and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data. An example of a mashup is the use of cartographic data to add location information to real estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct Web service that was not originally provided by either source.

• Folksonomies: A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging.

In upcoming posts we’ll explore the most widely used Web 2.0 tools by businesses and by government contractors in particular, as well as, identify some of the leaders in adopting these tools and how your business can learn from their successes and failures.