I want to formally thank all of the presenters at the Public Sphere Camp Gov 2.0: Policy and Practice event at parliament house yesterday.
All the speakers obviously put an enormous effort into their presentations. I am really grateful everyone was good-humoured about working within very tight time frames, and still able to convey such depth and substance! As a result, the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ was shared with hundreds of people both in the room and online.
In my closing remarks yesterday I outlined what happens next and I thought it would be good to blog those comments. I know Pia plans to post a follow-up too with respect to the details about what comes next.
In general, the Public Sphere continues online for a week. This is the opportunity for speakers to answer questions that were tweeted or blogged during or after the event. It is also a general invitation for members of the audience and/or people participating online to add their thoughts, comments, responses and more ideas in the blog. I really encourage the conversation to continue so that we really get a feel for what you think are priorities and so forth.
Pia and I thought that because of the time constraints for presentations, we wanted to invite and encourage speakers who were not able to give their whole presentation to record it so we can publish it online.
We hope to have the video up soon… maybe a few days, so please keep blogging.
After a week Pia we will post a draft report on a wiki for you all to contirbute to. This wiki will be open for 2 weeks. This phase of public sphere is essential as the result of this collaration will be what we present to the Ministers and the newly formed Gov2.0 Taskforce , chaired by professor Nick Gruen.
I was really pleased that we had so many people who will be on the taskforce at the public sphere! Three were on the speakers list. Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Alan Noble, Martin Stewart-Weekes. Other members present were of course the Chair Professor Gruen, who gave a brief outline of the taskforce and Lisa Harvey, and Sebastian Chan was tweeting! Adrian Cunningham from the National Archive would have been there but I know he was giving a presentation in China! Also, I want to send my regards to Alan Noble who is recovering from injury. Raul gave a terrific presentation on your behalf!
I want to thank again the wonderful sponsors that allowed us to stream the event live to facilitate online participation as well us providing the catering. Transact was the main sponsor and I sincerely thank Ivan Slavich and his team for their support. Thanks too to Agileware, BizCubed and Cisco. Public sphere is not a government funded initiative so we couldn’t have approached in the way we did without this sponsorship.
I also want to acknowledge and thank the hard working staff in sound and vision in the parliamentary departments. It was a sitting day in parliament and that means a very busy day for everyone. Their cooperation and support was essential to the success of public sphere.
Finally special thanks to the team that helped Pia in the organisational detail, program and setup: Stephen Collins, Craig Thomler, Rae Buerckner, Andrew Boyd and Jeff Waugh.
And to my intrepid staff, who are alwasy fantastic. Especially Pia whose talents are immense!
Kate
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And thanks to you for championing this event and to your staff, particularly Pia for all the hard work in putting together and running such a terrific event.
My brain may have felt like cottage cheese last night, but I suspect that before long it will mature into the creamy Camembert of accumulated wisdom, accompanied by the sharp gin of inspiration as a result of the wonderful combination of people and ideas brought together at Public Sphere 2.
Thanks so much to everyone who helped make it happen, and I hope the resultant paper informs and influences far beyond its community of contributors!
Well done to Senator Lundy, Pia Waugh and the Public Sphere team. I think it will be hard to hold back the tide now.
In the ‘Next Steps’, it will be important to enable non-tech savvy citizens to be involved. Following yesterday’s announcement, the major media coverage of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce is appearing predominantly in technology articles and not in the mainstream news. Obviously this is a solid base to build upon, but getting the non-tech community involved will be challenging.
A ‘publicsphere’ roadshow used to recruit regional champions would be a useful endeavour, especially if state governments and local councils would be willing to trial the current #publicsphere model.
One way to get citizens interested in the use of the model would be to trial the approach to address a policy issue of local relevance, rather than just the technology per se. For example, a local consultation could adopt the model for a fairly innocuous policy issue.
I think once citizens get a glimpse of the power of the model developed at #publicsphere, it will become commonplace rather quickly.
Thanks,
Michael.
I second that, it wouldn’t have happened without your support.