This week in Technically News: Open Government Week Starts May 12; White House Big Data Report Earns Praise, Skepticism; The Converging Worlds of Technology and Government.

This week in Technically News: Open Government: Building Trust and Civic Engagement; Amazon Cloud Receives DoD Security Stamp of Approval; Infrastructure Maintenance Takes Largest Piece of DHS IT Spending Pie.

We continue our conversation with Garrett Dunwoody, San Mateo County’s Open Data Manager, on the why of open data and its relationship with open government.

In this edition: Symantec CTO: Enterprise Security Still Needs Humans; As Data Centers Consolidate, Those Remaining Need to be More Efficient; Complexity is Cybersecurity’s Real Enemy; Cybersecurity Challenges in 2013; GitHub Hires First Government Liaison.

In October, I used “We the People” as an example of how to get citizens engaged with government in an open manner. In November, those engaged citizens petitioned the government to consider building a Death Star. By January, enough signatures had been gathered to garner the administration's consideration and, in my mind, a well authored response. The exercise may have been a geeky back and forth which you may see as a joke, but I feel any citizen engagement is good engagement. Here's why.