Hello to all participants in the inaugural public sphere.
At the event we discussed how we would be collating the ideas in a Wiki to allow further collaboration before feeding them into the appropriate channels of Government.
One of those channels is the Digital Economy Future Directions consultation process and paper being prepared by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, within Minister Conroy’s portfolio.
Given submissions to the draft paper closed on February 11, 2009, I asked the Minister today in Senate Estimates what the appropriate channel was for further input, such as the outcomes from our publicsphere. The Minister’s response was extremely positive that they are keen for ongoing input both through the Minister’s office and through the Digital Economy Section of the DBCDE. Mr James Cameron, First Asst Secretary of Regional Strategy, Digital Economy and Research Division offered himself as the right contact point.
In this regard, my suggestion is that we should prepare our document in the Wiki as a briefing paper that gives an overview of the topics raised, and provides links for further reading and analysis by the recipients. This can then be put through the appropriate channels in government, in this case, through Minister Conroys office . I urge you to take the time to edit and refine the document so we can get our ideas across clearly.
The future directions paper is due to finalised mid-July, so there is still time to provide input. In addition, the Minister said that the rapidly changing environment and the advent of a high bandwidth network effectively determines that consultation about the future directions of the digital economy needs to be ongoing.
There are instructions for how to use a Wiki and how to contribute on the Wiki page for the first Public Sphere: High Speed Bandwidth. All public collaborations on the Wiki will be linked from the main page of the Wiki to make them easier to find. The wiki page for the briefing paper will be open for public contributions for one week, and we anticipate it will mostly be participants and speakers who contribute to the page, however further contributions are welcome from others.
We wanted to ask the question mentioned above from Minister Conroy prior to putting the briefing paper up so we could try to format it appropriately. We’ll post the video from the question Senator Lundy asked Minister Conroy about public contributions a little later today and the transcript for everyone’s information, but we wanted to get the wiki page up and running as soon as possible for public contributions.
We’ll email all participants and speakers with details later today too.
