Public Sphere 3 wrapup

Update 2: all video content from the day is now online.

Update: all the Public Sphere 3 data was also put into an interactive analysis tool by Palantir, which would be useful for people to look at.

The Public Sphere on ICT & Creative Industry development last Friday drew together people from all over the country as well as Australians residing overseas. The event pushed the boundaries by including 3 locations (Wollongong, Melbourne and Brisbane) with Senator Lundy running the schedule from Wollongong.

Due to the complex nature of this last Public Sphere, there were some technical issues on the day as each location had streaming video to broadcast talks. Regardless, the outcomes from the day are excellent. There were also several pre-recorded talks that were submitted. The schedule was made up of primarily self-identified people from the ICT & Creative industries interested in putting forward some ideas for the day, and stimulating the discussions from which great policy and other ideas can be drawn.

Participation

We had around 100 physical participants on the day, and another 400 people remotely watching the Live Wall, which aggregated the video, Twitter, Flickr and Live Blogging content for easy access. We also had representation from the AIIA, ACS, OSIA, ICT Illawara,  Innovation Cities, the Creative Industries Innovation Centre and the Silicon Beach group, amongst other organisations, as well as many individuals and businesses.

Outcomes

The direct outcomes from this Public Sphere event include the many discussions and presentations from the day.

• Talks from the day are linked from the event schedule. Currently pre-recorded talks are up, and we anticipate having all the video up by the end of the week. Attendees will be notified by email.
• The Silicon Beach Lifeguard paper was put together for this Public Sphere and it includes the combined ideas from at least 60 people, along with feedback from hundreds on the mailing list. The Silicon Beach mailing list is made up of ICT industry entrepreneurs who aim to “to foster the growth of Australian technology companies”. As such this paper was a great starting point for further discussions.
• James Dellow did Live Blogging throughout the day, which also drew a further 212 comments plus James’ 282 comment effort. Thanks James!.
• The transcription of the #publicsphere tag for the last week shows over 1100 Tweets and 151 contributors. The value of contributions was quite high with a lot of external links and value discussions around the topic area. We had a lot less Tweets than the previous Public Sphere event largely due to a large number of the in person discussion outcomes being put into Zing.
• Zing was used to facilitate the in person discussions. The Melbourne discussions are tabled here, and the combined Brisbane and Wollong discussions are here. The reason for the split was an unexpected lack of wireless internet access in Melbourne for some of the day. Each person who commented in Zing was the scribe for a group of 7 to 9 participants (except for Brisbane who did it as one user for everyone). It worked reasonably well, and we anticipate further expanding either the same or similar technology for use by in person and remote attendees at the next Public Sphere. A big thanks to Donna Benjamin from Creative Contingencies for her assistance with Zing. There were almost 400 Zing comments by the end of the day from all three locations.
• There were and continue to be more comments added to the website along with additional external links.
• All the Public Sphere 3 data was also put into an interactive analysis tool by Palantir, which would be useful for people to look at.

Next steps?

But the Public Sphere event is just part of the process, and anyone interested in this topic is encouraged to continue to express their thoughts and ideas to the main Public Sphere 3 website comments, and directly to the briefing paper which will be published soon on a wiki, open for anyone to contribute. This wiki will be open for 3 weeks, so there is roughly 4 weeks still to contribute your thoughts. The final briefing paper will be contributed to the Information Technology Industry Innovation Council, an initiative by Minister Carr, the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

So the next steps for this Public Sphere are:

1. Contributions – any last contributions people want to make – blog posts, links, evidence, case studies – should be posted to the comments of the Public Sphere on ICT & Creative Industry development to be included in the briefing paper.
2. Briefing paper draft – we will put together a draft briefing paper on the wiki for public contributions by Monday the 7th September. It will include ideas, responses, evidence and recommendations from this Public Sphere topic.  It will draw on all comments, Tweets (#publicsphere), papers, tabled discussions, talks and blogs posts from above and that people link to in the comments. Please check out the briefing paper from the last Public Sphere on Government 2.0 for an idea of the format. It includes three parts – 1) about the topics discussed 2) about the recommendations and 3) statistics and information about the Public Sphere itself.
3. 4 weeks to edit – the briefing paper will be open to public contributions for four weeks. Till the 7th October.
4. Finalisation of briefing paper – the wiki will be closed off, and the briefing paper turned into a beautiful to read PDF. The original wiki page used for collaboration will be left up for probity and to review the public contributions made.
5. Handover to the Information Technology Industry Innovation Council – Senator Kate Lundy will hand over the finalised briefing paper to Minister Carr’s office to put to the Council, and they are looking forward to seeing the briefing paper.

Sponsors

The sponsors for this Public Sphere were:

• The University of Wollongong & the associated Innovation Campus (iC)
• NICTA & the NICTA OpinionWatch project – which will be used for Public Sphere theme and sentiment analysis, and will be showcased at the Canberra Techfest Sept 8th
• Trinity College – The University of Melbourne

Final thanks

Many thanks to all those who have already contributed, and specially to the volunteers who are helping to make the event happen. In particular our thanks to:

• From Wollongong: James Dellow and all the staff at the Innovation Centre
• From Brisbane: Steve Dalton, Des Walsh, Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Paul O’Keefe
• From Melbourne: Donna Benjamin, Christopher Hire – Donna & Chris had an exceptional challenge due to technical issues on the day, and we are very thankful for their perseverance in getting great outcomes in spite of the issues!
• From NICTA: Liz Jakubowski, Phil Robertson, Jonathan Gray, Terry Caelli, Barbara Duncan, Max Vit, Issam Ibrahim, Matt Hope & Clinton Buhse

Tagged: digital economy, egovernment, government, ICT, industry, infrastructure