BREAKFAST & REGISTRATION
Morning Show
Jay Ryan, Program Manager, Security Compass & Ashley Nichols, Chief Growth Officer, Improvix
Hosted by: Rachel Del Vecchio, Rise8 & Adam Furtado, Rise8


Uncharted: Shipping Software in the Age of AI
Bryon Kroger
Founder & CEO, Rise8

What Space Warfighters Need
General Stephen N. Whiting, Commander, U.S. Space Command

Fireside Chat: Outcomes Oriented Acquisition
Shannon Pallone, PAE, BMC3I
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BREAK
AI That Moves the Mission Forward
Josh Marcuse, Director of Defense Strategy & Growth, Google

Delivering in Government: The 2026 Reality
Suzette Kent, Former Federal Chief Information Officer of the United States
Hosted by: Kristin Pearson, Vice President of Customer Success, Rise8

LUNCH & LEARN
Hosted by RedHat
Kurt Kuntzelman, Strategic Account Manager, Space
Bureaucratic Profiles in Courage
Peter Dixon, Co-Founder, Arkenstone

Not Just Tech: Outcome Delivery from All Angles
Mina Hsiang, Former USDS Adminstrator
Hosted by: Becki Hyde, Delivery Lead, Rise8

BREAK
How AI Changes the Craft of Software Development
Kent Beck, Author & Founder, Extreme Programming

AI Leadership in GovTech
Tom Roderick, Founder & Chief Technology/AI Officer, Flamelit
Bharat Patel, Managing Director and AI & Data Lead for Defense, Accenture
Jazmin Furtado, AI & National Security, Google
Hosted by: Courtney Barno, COO, Anthropic



BREAK
What If We Get This Right?
The Identity Reset for Leaders Navigating Mission at the Speed of AI
Patti Fletcher, Author, Strategic Advisor

LIVE MUSIC HAPPY HOUR
Feat. Brooks Herring
BREAKFAST & REGISTRATION
Morning Show
Felisha Daemer, VP of Public Sector, Infusion Points, Mandy Graham, Director of Operations, Empower AI
Hosted by: Rachel Del Vecchio, Rise8 & Adam Furtado, Rise8


Navigating Uncharted Territory: Lessons From The Past & The Futures
Dan Ward, Co-Founder, SparkLit Group

Introducing the Outcome Factory
Bryon Kroger
Founder & CEO, Rise8

BREAK
Mapping Flow to Reveal, Navigate, and Overcome Constraints
Steven Pereira, Lead Consultant, Visible Value Stream Consulting

From Chaos to Clarity: Designing Around the Domain
Paul Rayner, Author, The EventStorming Handbook

Mapping the Mission
Paul Rayner, Author, The EventStorming Handbook
Steven Pereira, Lead Consultant, Visible Value Stream Consulting
Hosted by: Rob Monroe, Product Management Enablement Lead, Rise8



LUNCH
Deterministic by Design
Palantir Technical Team Lead
The Living Harness: Stop AI-Assisted Code from Drifting in Production
Russ Miles, AI & Platform Engineering Training Expert

AI Augmented Software Development in Government
Nicky Pike, Field CTO for the Americas, Coder
Hosted by: Mike Gehard, Head of AI, Rise8


BREAK
When Compliance Replaces the Mission
Jonathan Mostowski, President, Agile Acquisitions, LLC

Leveraging SBIR Phase III for Faster Acquisition
Bryan Guinn, Chief Growth Officer, SBIR Advisors

Buying Mission Outcomes
Lori Ann Rissler, Founder, LASR Ops
Dolores Kuchina-Musina, CEO & Founder, REXOTA Solutions, LLC
Ryan Connell, Deputy of the Rapid Acquisition Cell, CDAO
Hosted by: Max Reele, Vice President of Delivery, Rise8




BREAK
Speed of Relevance, Scale at Risk
Chris Hughes, Founder, Resilient Cyber

Transforming GRC Into Mission Engineering
Charles Nwatu, Former Netflix Head of GRC Engineering, Mario Lunato, Field CISO, Knox
Hosted by: Lloyd Evans, Head of Cybersecurity, Rise8



Where GovTech Needs to Go From Here
Bryon Kroger
Founder & CEO, Rise8

LIVE MUSIC HAPPY HOUR
Feat. Derek Stoner
Sponsored by SBIR Advisors
Pick one full-day workshop and focus on a single area of practice, turning the strategies from Days 1 and 2 into a working playbook for delivery in the age of AI. You'll leave with applied work in hand.
BREAKFAST
Morning Show
Mark Perry, Director of Growth, Tech Partnership/FS, Spectro Cloud
Hosted by: Rachel Del Vecchio & Adam Furtado


WORKSHOPS
See descriptions below and make your selection during registration
LUNCH
WORKSHOPS
CLOSING
Workshop Title
Description
Impact Lab for Leaders: Build Purposeful Software with AI
Led by Impact Lab Team
AI mandates and speed-first directives are moving faster than any GovTech strategy decks can keep up with. Impact Lab for leaders is a one-day, hands-on AI build. You’ll use AI-native tools to solve a real-world problem, build technical confidence, evaluate what AI can do, and leave with working software in production.
Harnessing Security Agents
Led by Lloyd Evans and Jeremy Arzuaga
Security can’t live in slide decks, waiver queues, or a checklist someone signs at the end. This hands-on workshop teaches Policy-as-Code as fieldcraft for government delivery teams: how to turn compliance and security requirements into automated tests that run against Kubernetes, infrastructure, and platform workflows. You’ll practice using the evidence those tests produce to harden delivery and keep builders moving.
Outcome-Based Acquisition: Mapping Contracts to Mission Outcomes
Led by Nick Setterberg
Most acquisitions buy deliverables: features, milestones, hours. This facilitator-led workshop shows you how to trace work from mission need to user value, then use what the map reveals to structure an acquisition around measurable mission outcomes and continuous delivery—instead of a fixed list of deliverables a vendor can complete without moving the mission. You'll leave with a method you can run with your own team, the language to make the case for it, and a prioritized plan for restructuring an acquisition around the outcomes that matter.
Find Your Flow: A Value Stream Mapping Workshop for Navigating Constraints
Led by Steve Pereira
You can’t improve a system you can’t see. This hands-on workshop applies Flow Engineering and Value Stream Mapping to trace your work from mission need to user value, exposing the queues, handoffs, rework, decision latency, and hidden dependencies slowing it down. You’ll leave with a map of where the work stalls and a prioritized plan to clear obstacles and deliver measurable outcomes in production.
From Chaos to Coordinates: A DDD EventStorming Workshop
Led by Paul Rayner
Stop guessing and start mapping. This hands-on DDD EventStorming workshop helps technical and non-technical delivery teams make sense of mission complexity through a realistic simulation. You’ll map the step-by-step workflows of a real mission area, uncovering the inconsistencies and gaps in how work actually flows. Then you’ll practice connecting commands, aggregates, and events—the raw material for event-driven and event-sourced architecture decisions. You’ll leave with the method, the muscle memory, and a map you can rebuild with your team back home.
The Living Harness: Stop AI-Assisted Code from Drifting in Production
Led by Russ Miles
Government delivery teams are under pressure to move faster, and mission-critical codebases are drifting quietly—because every session ends with the agent forgetting your conventions, your decisions, and the production incident that reshaped your error-handling. This hands-on workshop teaches agentic engineering as fieldcraft: a trust protocol for verifying AI output before it ships, a five-question interview for surfacing the constraints the model can't see, and a version-controlled harness that makes your team's hard-won understanding durable and enforced. You'll leave with a working HARNESS.md in your own repo, garbage-collection rules wired into your pipelines, and a 30-day plan to stop the drift before it reaches production—or your next authorization review.
