GovLoop Goes Corporate

Steve Ressler, the Homeland Security Department employee behind GovLoop, a federal social networking site, announced today that he's selling the site to email alert provider GovDelivery and leaving DHS to manage the site full-time. I'm happy for Steve, of course, but it strikes me as too bad that he has to leave government to do this. Initiatives like Intellipedia may still be in the relatively early stages, but the federal government has a clear capacity for and interest in social networking technology. It seems to me like it would have been great if DHS could have been a home for GovLoop but opened it up to state and local governments, functioning as a kind of grand-scale online fusion center. And that's only one way the system could have played out. Maybe government just isn't there yet, but it's an intriguing alternate vision.