The strength of Australia is our people, their humility and kindness, their willingness to lend a helping hand to those in need of support. The Gillard Government is recognising the extraordinary contribution made many Australians in our communities through the People of Australia Ambassador’s Program.

The 40 People of Australia Ambassadors, appointed by the Prime Minister, are outstanding Australians who work to bring people together and build bridges of understanding and respect.

Communities thrive when people are encouraged to participate and share a common future. The inaugural program reflects the strength of leadership throughout our communities and our capacity as a nation to welcome people and make them feel part of our community.

The program is a practical way to recognise the valuable role local citizens play in strengthening their communities and building bridges of understanding and respect. Through the program the Ambassadors will have an opportunity to promote the value of their work and provide advice to government and the independent Australian Multicultural Council.

The program is about recognising the positive impact many outstanding Australians are having on the ground.

All the ambassadors have their own stories and their contributions are diverse. However, they share in common a drive to make a difference and bring people together.

Through their efforts People of Australia Ambassadors have engaged countless young people through sport, helped thousands of young students overcome language barriers, and created volunteer organisations that draw on the strength of the community to help people settle in Australia to name a few. Their contributions are substantial.

If you’re an AFL fan you would know one of the 40 ambassadors selected, Harry O’Brien, who plays for Collingwood.

It was an honour to meet Harry O’Brien, at Gosch’s Oval in Melbourne yesterday and hear more about the AFL multicultural sports program and the many community activities he is engaged with.

Everyone knows Harry is a remarkable player on the field, but off the field he gives back to the community.

Harry is a wonderful role model who actively works to make a difference. We need more people like him. His conviction and his passion for making a positive difference is empowering young people and inspiring them to reach for their full potential. 

In fact, all 40 of our Ambassadors are great role models in their own way, to find out more about the program click here or vist the AMC site. 

Or check out these videos and listen to some of their stories:

Pastor Brad Chilcott
Jennifer Barrera
Dr Tien Nguyen
Ahmed Dini

As part of the National Year of Reading in 2012 the first National Year of Reading initiative – ‘Our Story’ – is already underway with every state and territory around the country voting on a shortlist of six books each. The aim is to find one book from each state and territory which will form a collection that, when read together, describes the Australian experience.

The list of eight winning titles and the start of Australia’s biggest book group for the National Year of Reading will be announced at a special event at the National Library of Australia in February.

For more information about what will be happening in the ACT during National Year of Reading and ACT Ambassadors visit http://www.library.act.gov.au/

ACT Ambassadors for the National Year of Reading 2012

• Katy Gallagher – ACT Chief Minister and Minister for Territory and Municipal Services (Primary Ambassador)
• Simon Corbell, MLA – Attorney General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development
• Kate Lundy – Federal Senator for the ACT
• Jackie French – Author
• Marion Halligan – Author
• Jack Heath – Author
• Tania McCartney – Author
• Omar Musa – Spoken Word Artist
• Jess Bibby – Captain, Canberra Capitals
• Canberra Roller Derby League
• Phil Davis – Greater Western Sydney Giants
• Grace Gill – Canberra United
• Matt Toomua – ACT Brumbies
• Mark Carmody – Weather presenter, ABC News
• Louise Maher – Drive Presenter, 666 ABC
• Rob Paxevanos – Host, Fishing Australia
• Scotty and Nige, FM 104.7 Breakfast Presenters
• Jack Waterford – Editor at Large, The Canberra Times
• Mark Sullivan – Managing Director, ACTEW AGL
• Rod Little, Chairperson of the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elected Body (ATSIEB)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video Transcript

Kate Lundy (Senator for the ACT): We’re at the launch of the Year of Reading, it is next year 2012 and this is the Chief Minister and she is the official Ambassador for the Year of Reading. So what do you like to read?

Katy Gallagher (ACT Chief Minister): I like to read when it is not for work, read for pleasure, nice stories not horrible stories or sci-fi or anything too heavy, as I get plenty of that for work.

Kate Lundy: We have worked out that we have incompatible reading tastes. So what is your favourite kind of novel?

Katy Gallagher: Stories about real life. Interesting stories about interesting people. But again, not too heavy. I don’t like any tragedies, I don’t like any violence, I don’t like any make believe. There is lots of it around like that.

Kate Lundy: Were you shocked to find out about the literacy rates in launching this today?

Katy Gallagher: The latest data says that about one in three Canberra adults don’t have a level of literacy that lets them lead a successful life. I think that is really shocking because you wouldn’t think a place like Canberra, a relatively well educated community would have levels like that. But it is not that hidden, so part of next year is really about raising awareness, encouraging people to read and really putting the effort in the early years with this.

Kate Lundy: Well hopefully we can inspire a lot more people to take up their favourite book and read something new perhaps in 2012.

A range of local charities are set to benefit from the sale of a house in Franklin which is being built and auctioned for charity.

Chief Minister Katy Gallagher today launched the Franklin Charity House project which involves a new charity partnership between the Land Development Agency (LDA) and the Master Builders Association of the ACT (MBA).

The partnership will result in a house being built at Franklin and the funds from the sale of the house being distributed to local charities.

The charities to benefit from the funds raised from the sale of the Franklin Charity House are:

• the YWCA who will use the funds to help meet the needs of older single retired women;
• YouthCARE – offering a range of services to homeless youth;
• Canberra Men’s Centre – helping men regain a valued place in society;
• Innana – an agency specialising in crisis accommodation for women and children; and
• Toora Women – providing accommodation and support services for women

Video transcript: 

I’m here outside the LDA building in Canberra and I’ve just been to the launch of the Franklin Charity House.

This is a fantastic project where the Master Builders Association (MBA), Classic Construction and a heap of other companies from the building and construction industry have contributed to building a house which will be sold and the profits distributed to really worthy charities here in Canberra.

The charities themselves include Innana, YouthCare, Toora Women, the Canberra Men’s Centre and the YWCA, five charities that all work towards reducing homelessness and supporting families and people in need.

It is a fantastic cause, if you would like to find out more about the Franklin Charity House you can go to www.franklincharityhouse.org.au

Many thanks to the Chief Minister of the ACT, Katy Gallagher who launched the House today. We did it inside because we were worried about the rain and the whether being not so good. It didn’t rain but now it is formally launched and I certainly encourage people to go to the website to find out more about this fantastic Canberra project.

As a normal part of the Public Sphere analysis stage, we look at both the data and the communities who have contributed. The data analysis is where we find the ideas, peer review, case studies, sentiment, emerging themes and other content from the participating community. Community analysis is where we look at the network of contributors, what sectors they are from, how they interrelate, and the context of who they are. This helps us understand the context of the contributions.

We constantly look for and experiment with tools to achieve both of these analysis goals. There are many data analysis tools out there. We have experimented with Opinion Watch from NICTA, Leximancer, Wordle and some data visualisation tools.

And we have a role too. As the convenors of a Public Sphere consultation, our job is to curate the contributions into a first iteration of a report in a useful and readable format. It is this draft report that is opened up to wiki edits and peer review feedback by the participating community.

With regard to community analysis, there aren’t a lot of quality tools we’ve found that give us the flexibility to define and interact with metadata about the communities who have participated. In two Public Spheres, we heavily used Palantir, a computer forensics tool that visualises the networks created through the digital conversation within social networks as part of the Public Sphere. This tool demonstrates one way that you get to know the community of participants in relation to each other and their contributions. Please check out the video below to see the ways we used this tool in the Digital Culture Public Sphere.

Many thanks to Leximancer and to Palantir for their support in the Digital Culture Public Sphere, and particularly to Palantir for putting this excellent video together.

Tools like these will be increasingly important to understanding the breadth and substance of contributions in public consultations, particularly when using online and digital environments. The analysis can paint a picture of the representativeness of contributions, identify gaps in the contributing community, build understanding of the context around ideas put forward, and ideally, help us be able to identify when a consultation is being gamed, providing an important check and balance to the process.

Please add to the comments, and let us know any tools you’ve been playing with in this space that would be interesting to try at the next Public Sphere.

Kate and Pia

Click here to view the embedded video.

Transcript:
(voice over by Andrew Lampert)

In August 2011, Australian Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, issued a discussion paper seeking public input to the National Cultural Policy.

This policy will present a 10 year strategy vision for the arts, cultural and creative endeavours in Australia.

The Office of Senator Kate Lundy, in collaboration with the Office of Minister Crean, ran a Digital Culture Public Sphere consultation to gather public input to this policy, and used Palantir to integrate and analyse the contributions from across a range of media.

The aim was to illicit visions for success from relevant sectors on the digital culture landscape and also to seek specific ideas for how to reach these goals.

Using Palantir, we integrated contributions that people made to a range of sites including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, the Public Sphere wiki, and IdeaScale, a site for posting and voting on ideas.

Let’s take a look at how we import this data into the Palantir platform.

Here we’ve got a spreadsheet containing information about the people who registered to attend the live Public Sphere event. We simply drag and drop this onto the Palantir workspace to begin importing this data.

Next, we map the spreadsheet columns to properties and objects in the dynamic ontology, which represents the conceptual model that’s been defined for the Public Sphere event.

In this case we’re mapping properties like names, emails addresses and digital culture sector affiliations to people objects so we can model the contributions from different sectors and different people across media types.

The result of this process is a collection of people objects that represent the people who registered to attend the live event. These people objects have properties associated with them. The email addresses, names and digital culture sector affiliation we just saw.

Having seen one way we can load data, let’s take a look at an overview of all the data that was contributed during the Public Sphere consultation.

The object explorer application gives us a top down view of the almost 6000 contributions across the different media types.

Within the object explorer, the timeline helper gives us a temporal look at this data. We can also explore it and slice it by contributions to specific media sites. We can see for example small numbers of contributions to YouTube and Facebook, a larger number of blog comments and wiki edits, and a peak of IdeaScale votes towards the end of the consultation period once ideas had come to fruition.

The largest peak on the graph represents more than 2000 tweets that were registered during the live event on October 6th.

One of the challenges when gathering contributions from different sources is to identify those contributions that were actually from the same person, even when that person has used different user accounts with different names across these different systems.

Palantir provides entity resolution tools that can be used to help with this process. These rule based approaches can be used to merge user accounts which share an email address or a name, or any other properties, into a single underlying person entity.

Further manual resoltuion can also be done to allow tacit knowledge and human intuition to be used to further resolve different user identities that represent the same undelying person.

Now that we’ve resolved our user accounts to the underlying people, we can begin to explore the contributions from each sector of the digital culture landscape.

These sectors are defined as digital arts, film and animation, media and music, games development and cultural institutions and big picture contributions that cut across these sectors. One way to approach this sector analysis is to begin with the people entities, that is, the people who have made contributions.

The first step is to map each person into the sector or sectors that they represent. 18% of contributors attended the live event and explicitly provided this information at registration.

For everyone else we must analyse the available information to determine which sectors they represent. We can do this a number of ways. One approach is to use the text cloud help that shows frequent terms that occur in the profile information that’s associated with people who contributed.

We can use this information to identify and group users. For example, those who mentioned galleries, library collections, museums or archives in their profile are likely to represent the cultural institution sector.

This grouping of matching users can then be manually checked to make sure that the sector information that is assigned to each person is of high quality. Another approach is to look at the domains associated with people’s email addresse. Many cultural institutions for example have readily recognisable email domains that make it relatively easy to identify contributors from those institutions and again to allocate them to the relevant sector.

There are of course many other ways of analysing the data.

Once we’ve analysed and allocated sectors to the people who contributed, we can then search from our contributing people to find all the documents and ideas that they’ve contributed. The links on this graph represent the authoring links, that is, the links between a person and the contributions that they’ve made across the different sites.

We can safely remove the orphan nodes from this graph. These represent people who for instance have registered for the live event but have not attended, or at least have not contributed to any of the digital sources.

The remaining set of people represent everyone who made a contribution to the various digital sites from which data was contributed during the Public Sphere consultation.

Defining this set of users allows us to drill down on only the active contributing users when we start exploring contributions across the different sectors.

We begin by histograming the properties of all users who contributed and we can see the sector affiliations that we’ve previously associated with people.

We can drill down on any specific sector, for example, cultural institutions, and then look at the documents that were contributed by people representing this sector.

We can see more than 1500 contributions were made from the cultural institutions sector, and can timeline these across the Public Sphere consultation period to explore temporal patterns in the data.

The most obvious peak is that of around 900 Tweets during the live event on October 6th, and this pattern correlates with the larger pattern of all contributions across all sectors.

We can repeat this process for the other digital culture sectors. For example here we’re showing it for the digital arts sector, and again we can timeline the results and see there is a similar distribution of contributions across the period with a peak of Tweets during the live event.

Our final analysis will explore the Tweets contributed during the consultation period, and focus in on those during the live event.

We’ll begin by exploring the proportion of retweets to novel tweets, and we can use a filter in the workspace to achieve this. We can organise the results and see the relative proportion of tweets verses retweets. Across the consultation period 43% of Tweets were retweets.

Next using our timeline helper, we can provide a temporal filter that allows us to focus in on just the tweets from the period during the live event on Thursday the 6th of October.

From here we can search around to retrieve the linked entities, that is the people who represent the authors of these Tweets. This will allow us to discover who was Tweeting during the live event.

Of the 556 people who Tweeted with the #publicsphere hashtag, 65% did so during the live event. When we lay out the graph, we can see some dense clusters representing people who’ve Tweeted many times.

Our histogram helper can help us identify the top three tweeters during the live event. In this case, Kathryn Greenhill, Fee Plumley and Pia Waugh.

Thanks for watching this presentation about how Palantir was used to analyse contributions to the Digital Culture Public Sphere consultation.

He brought along the ‘box’ (NTU) that people will get when they subscribe to a retail service provider (think ISP) delivering their service (voice and/or internet) on the NBN.

Dan also explained the structure of access and transit networks that NBN Co are building across Australia, putting into context the construction program of the network in our community here in Gungahlin.

Construction is organised through Fibre Serving Area Modules, or FSAMs. Each FSAM is about 2 to 3 thousand homes. In Gungahlin, there have been two FSAMs announced, covering Ngunnawal and Amaroo mostly. You can see a map of the first 2 FSAMs (the first 5000-6000 premises) being built on the Gungahlin map linked on the NBN site.

The footprint for the next FSAMs and the rest of the Gungahlin region will be available will be early next year.

The good news is that the NBN Co. announcement in October not only confirmed that 20,800 premises (the Gungahlin region) are in the time frame for commencement in the next 12 months, but that FSAMs should take around 12 months, on average, from start to switch on.

This means that it is reasonable to expect all Gungahlin region residents to be switched on progressively over the next two years.

Dan Flemming also canvassed the implications of the Telstra deal and what that meant for the build here. People who came to the last meeting will recall that the agreement with Telstra was still being finalised. With that all sorted out, Dan was able to give good information about the Points of Interconnects (PoIs) and the use and access to Telstra exchanges and conduit etc.

He confirmed that some Telstra infrastructure will be used here, including space in the Crace exchange and access to the existing underground conduit as examples. Silcar, the construction company, were also represented at the meeting and hence available to answer questions about the different phases of construction.

Of great interest is the maps for the next FSAMs to be started. Dan made it clear that these maps won’t be released until the detailed design work for each one is completed. He reckoned the next FSAM maps (for the interest of long suffering Palmerston, Nicholls, et al) should be available in February or March.

Below is a short video where I chat to Dan about NBN in Gungahlin.

I took some questions from last night and will post responses in the coming days. Please post any other outstanding questions you have about NBN in Gungahlin and I’ll endeavour to get you answers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Transcript:

Senator Lundy:

I’m with Dan Fleming, the head of construction at NBN Co. It’s a big day for Canberra because NBN Co will be presenting to the Gungahlin Community Council Meeting tonight. Dan, tell us what you’re going to be saying at the meeting.

Dan Fleming:

We’re going to come and explain what really the NBN rollout for the next 12 months means for the residents of the Gungahlin community. We announced in October a rolling 12 month plan, and we’ll explain really what that means.

Senator Lundy:

It’s great news because of course in October we heard that there were some 20,800 people that would be serviced by the NBN started in that 12 month plan, so can you just give us a bit more idea of timing and what’s actually going on out there at the moment.

Dan Fleming:

Yep, sure. We announced that 20,800 premises would be commenced within the next 12 months, now we do that in a very controlled way, in a series of modules, and we’ve agreed with the contractors that will be doing the work when they’ll be doing those modules. So what it means is that when we start a module, it takes about 12 months to start and complete that module and start connecting customers.

So if we start 20,800 premises in the next 12 months, in the subsequent 12 months we should finish those 20,800.

Senator Lundy:

Well that’s pretty exciting because I know that’s pretty much all of Gungahlin. So thanks for being here. I know it’ll be an interesting meeting. Hopefully we’ll get a great turn out and the interest in Canberra just keeps growing with the rollout of the NBN, so thanks.

Dan Fleming:

You’re very welcome.

Date: Tuesday 13th December 2011

Time: 7:00pm-9:00pm

Where: Gungahlin Library, downstairs meeting room

The meeting will be attended by NBN Co’s Head of Construction Dan Fleming and will include:

• An overview of the constructions’ timing and processes
• An update on the status of the 12 month building program
• Details on Retail Service Provider (RSP) pricing and
• An update on planned local community notification and engagement

This will be a good opportunity to find out more about the details of the update and ask questions.

In October NBN Co announced that the rollout has been extended in Gungahlin to 20,800 premises over the next 12 months.

NBN Co also announced a detailed map for the rollout in Gungahlin will be released in January 2012.

The NBN will provide access to high-speed broadband to all Australian premises. Under Labor, every home, school, hospital and business will receive high-speed broadband via the NBN – no one will miss out.

Further information on the NBN is available at www.nbn.gov.au and www.nbnco.com.au

I hope to see you there.

Kate.

All transcripts are under the videos below and the interviews are captioned.

Senator Kate Lundy speaking on Gov 2.0 at FutureGov 2011 (@katelundy)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Short video with Chris Moore, CIO of the City of Edmonton, Canada
@chrisj_moore | blog
Captions available on the video and transcript below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

 Short video with Andrew Stott, previous Director of Digital Engagement in the UK
@dirdigeng | data.gov.uk
Captions available on the video and transcript below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Senator Kate Lundy – Address to FutureGov 2011

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are gathered this morning and pay my respects to their elders past and present and thank them for their ongoing contribution to our beautiful community here in the nation’s capital.

For those of you who were unfortunate not to get out for a run or a walk this morning, it was a beautiful morning. I would like to thank FutureGov for hosting this conference here. It is a pleasure to be here to address you.

I’d like to reflect on a number of issues. I’ll start with the questions. Does the government of the 21^st century shape, or conversely merely reflect the health of our democracy and our resilience as a civil society? Well I firmly believe the government shapes both. At a time when unexpected issues like natural disasters, cycles of the global economic financial crisis create uncertainty and there is a need for ongoing leadership in the shape of government and the methods we use to engage with citizens.

How decisions are made and implemented informs the level of confidence and trust held by citizens in their government and in their public administration. Resilience is about the capacity to adapt to consequences of a major event. How governments ensure that we have resilience within our services is a key determinant of success in a very uncertain future.

This means transparency and openness about how decisions are made is a prerequisite to building that confidence and trust and therefore to making sure that our democratic institutions stay strong. In some respects it’s not a new thing. We’ve often talked about evidence based policy; working from the facts, straight forward learning from experience, sharing our knowledge and applying it in innovative ways.

And the digital environment and social networking tools are creating extraordinary and unprecedented new opportunities for engagement between citizens and government. This connectedness across society is changing everything. There are new ways to tackle old challenges.

Ladies and Gentlemen I believe there is a growing hunger among citizens motivated by a desire to contribute to the public good. To make the world a better place, to share their ideas and expertise to meet other like minded citizens, to know more about and get involved in the process. This hunger for participation presents challenges for government the world over.

There is no better time to be contemplating the shape of things to come in our democracy and our future as a resilient civil society. The government of the future will be one that offers an open platform for participation, a safe and secure place to contribute and collaborate, a source of trusted reliable data, authentic engagement where manipulation is demonstrably absent. The character and function of government of the future emerges from the universal values of fairness, opportunity freedom and respect. These values form the basis of the vision this government has for Australia and however we express it, I choose to do it like this.

Australia aspires to an innovative, productive, export-orientated economy to sustain a culturally diverse, socially just and resilient connected and inclusive society in a sustainable environment. Within this statement the framework for policies for a brighter future can be found. In applying the extraordinary opportunity provided by the digital age, I’d like to speak about some of your focus over the next couple of days.

There is the platform, how do ensure universal access to the digital tools that will sustain us in the future. The skills, the knowledge, the confidence, the research and innovation and the engagement and open government. But first to the platform.

The Australian government is the only one in the world that is investing in a whole sale only open access indecently regulated fibre to the premises broadband network. This public investment in the economic and social infrastructure of the 21^st century grew out of years of market failure and flawed competition policy and a lack of vision. It was announced by the government in its current form on the back of the private market having been tested and the senate inquiry that determined that fibre to the node was not future proof. The broadband network has many attributes and I only want to mention two.

First, the bandwidth. The speeds able to be achieved on the fibre network will be unprecedented and able to be updated as the technology at either end continues to develop. The innovation in services and facilities that accompanies the availability of high bandwidth is demonstrable in economic terms with the recent Deloitte research sponsored by Google citing a 50 billions dollar contribution to the economy as a result of building the NBN.

Second, it is the universality of the NBN that means that Australia will be able to close the digital divide. The inevitable closure of the digital divide means that any investment in online services or platforms for engagement will be available, at least in theory, to all citizens. This opens the door to strong public investment in innovation in Australia where other countries are tempered by their reality tat their investments will only ever be for some, not all, of their population. Participation in the online world will not be determined by geographic location or a pare gains lottery, but by skills and knowledge. The internet means that people pull information to them they don’t have to sit and wait for a big push from someone else’s decision.

This takes me to my next point, the skills. The Australian government has made significant investment in the digital education revolution program which has put computers in the hands of the next generation of school leavers. Making them better prepared for the work force. This program is underpinned by a wonderful attribute that Australian’s share.

That is; we are a nation of early adopters. We have a high standard of living and terrific education outcomes relative to other western democracies and we move fast when new services arrive and products come onto the market. This trend is also reflected in our use of social media. Youtube Facebook and Twitter all experienced rapid growth in Australia.

Our cultural diversity also sits as a great asset for Australia in a globalised world. International credentials are essential for ongoing collaboration in social entrepreneurship, commerce science research personalisation. All of these things are great strength and they deserve to be recognised.

Australia also has a remarkable history in the area of innovation. I’m sure that many of you know this, but one of the first computers in the world, CSIRAC was built here in Australia under the leadership of Trevor Pearcey. In whose hour the computer society’s Pearcey Foundation is named. The characteristics of our modern technology innovators are true to Pearcey and his contemporaries humble yet amazing by global standards. The genius and the magnitude of their contribution often not recognised and celebrated enough and still far too often I hear from people overseas about the wonderful reputation Australia has only to find that the Aussie technology solutions so celebrated elsewhere struggle to land a government contract here.

We need to inspire young people into the career options in computing science, engineering, mathematics and informatics. I can’t fathom why it’s getting harder and not easier to fill these courses. The definition of an IT career perhaps is getting harder.

As IT becomes core business it becomes the purview of management at least to provide the leadership to understand the potential of the use of the information technology tools that may determine the success of failure of every business. Without this leadership organisations would simply respond to the shrink wrap solutions and fail to innovate and leverage the potential of digital tools. This is true in both the public and private sector and this takes me onto where I want to spend a little time. That is on open government.

The open government agenda presents governance with a greater capacity for resilience to bounce back from unexpected issues through community engagement and collaboration and I’d like to cite the Queensland disasters last summer and the work of the Queensland police in applying social networking for a first response to give us an understanding as to what was happening on the ground. Congratulations to them for their recent award for this work. I often talk about three pillars of open government.

• Democratising data; making government data openly available generates public trust which is important when it comes to timely information delivery, such as through online communication mechanisms and means.
• Citizen centric services; By designing citizen centric services that helps citizens hep themselves; I compare with interest the contrast between bank services ands government services. I dream of the day where accessing government services online is not just another way to do it but its compelling, its effective, its fun and people want to go there because it gets the job done quicker.
• Participatory government; presenting an opportunity to collaborate and establish feedback loops tapping into every part of society to establish resilience in how government responds to new and emerging issues. Done well this compliments the work both of public servants and elected representatives of parliament.

In the last two years we’ve seen substantial shift in the landscape and policy area. This has placed Australia at the forefront of global trends in Gov2.0. The ongoing strength of our economy means we can continue to progress where other nations are finding they perhaps need to falter on their agenda.

Starting with the Gov2.0 taskforce leading to the declaration of open government; the publishing of “Ahead of the game” the blueprint for the direction of the public service under the chairmanship of Terry Moran, the establishment of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the cyber community strategy. All of these policy shifts present significant challenges and opportunities for government agencies and departments and these changes define the nature of the Gov2.0 agenda.

Now, in most of my presentations I like to run through a quick checklist of Gov2.0 and I’d like to do the same today. It is about inter-operability, it is about discoverability of data, open standard so we’re not going to have to pay through the nose to get it in the future, it is about trust and transparency, it’s about collaboration and sharing and there is a need to make sure that we are thinking about privacy and security right from the start.

The security imperative grows every single day. To leave it to the last minute as a consideration is pure folly. There are opportunities to, obviously the loud, decentralised services , data centres, cyber security collaboration and carbon footprint. So many opportunities exist here to lighten that carbon footprint through the smart use of technology.

I’d just like to spend a minute on data centres and data sovereignty and how it relates to resilience. Cloud computing is an area of technology that needs to be approached with thoughtfulness. It’s reasonably new and how we integrate it into businesses is something of great excitement, but also of consideration of the privacy and security issues that need to come to the fore. I recommend the AGIMO cloud computing paper which outlines some of the security considerations needing to be taken into account; particularly in approaching it from the public sectors point of view.

With respect, I’d like a word about sovereignty. If a data centre is hosted in a country governed by different privacy laws then a jurisdictional list needs to be considered for the Australian government or public data to be hosted there. I strongly believe that attention needs to be paid to the protection of that data.

Around the world we know that we are leading as a country in this area. There’s a whole range of opportunities that exist. We’ve got great strengths in the geospatial organisation of information in the public sector. There are great opportunities that exist in the release of this information into the private sector to allow in novation to occur. And most all what I’d like to say is unless we procure technology in a clever way then we are not going to be able to innovate across the public sector. There are myriad lessons across the international landscape about what a trap a having procurement system that mitigates against innovation can be.

There’s so much information out there for people to access. The open technology foundation supports open technology standards and methods and just last weekend we had a GovCamp here in Canberra for technology innovators, soon to be a regular event.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are an extraordinary country in the field of ICT and it’s much a part of the cross-fertilization of ideas and innovation between our public and private research and our public and private sectors. Future Gov as a congress presents an opportunity for us to lift up and celebrate those achievements I think over many years, but also a very assertive forward thinking agenda to ensure that Australia retains its place at the forefront of these developments. For all of the strengths I mentioned we are an amazing society. Our innovators and our researchers are world class. Please remember this as you set your own vision and pursue your own aspirations in the work that you do. Good luck with your congress.

I’ve got one announcement to make before I finish and that is that next year in 2012 the major international FutureGov summit is coming to Australia to be hosted right here in the National convention centre. In partnership with the Australian e-Government technology cluster NICTA, they will stage the FutureGov summit in Australia from the 17^th to the 19^th of September 2012. It will bring to Australia more than 75 top level government and ICT thought leaders from across the world. I know the Australian Pavilion will be showcasing over 20 local companies. This is a fantastic opportunity to build our reputation and improve our opportunities for international collaboration.

It’s an exciting time. Thankyou for having me here this morning and good luck in your deliberations.

Short video with Chris Moore transcript:

Pia:

This is Chris Moore, the CIO of the City of Edmonton. Just thought we’d take a few minutes to have a quick chat.

So how are you enjoying FutureGov and what are your thoughts on what’s happening in Gov 2.0 in Australia?

Chris:

Really enjoying FutureGov. It’s a great opportunity for leaders from around the world and across Australia to get together and talk about the future. But for me, I’ve been following what’s been happening in Australia for a couple of years now.

We’ve been really focused on Open Government and Open Data and unfortunately, in Canada, from a national perspective, we’re not leading in the world and I’ve always seen Australia as a world leader.

Part of the challenge is that there’s lots of great things happening here and until you step off the continent and talk to other people you don’t realise all the great things you are doing.

Whether it’s Canada, or the US, or even the UK, people are watching, observing and looking to replicate a lot of the great success that you’re doing.

Pia:

Oh, well that’s wonderful to hear. And what have you thought of some of the case studies that you’ve heard here, what have been some of the standout things that you’ve noticed?

Chris:

Well, for me, and as we’re trying to drive forward with changing government, with transforming government using technology, a lot of the things I’ve heard in the sessions have validated that we’re on the right track.

Whether it’s leveraging social media, or looking at bringing your own device, how we use the cloud, how we can better collaborate with citizens. And so I appreciate coming to an event like this not just to talk about what we’re doing but also to hear what other people are doing and either finding out that we’re on the right track or we’re slightly ahead of the pack.

And you know, in government people don’t talk about competition, but people are looking to be a leader in their country or in the world in certain areas, so people share information but I can always tell that people are making notes and going back to their agency and saying “ok, we’ve got to get ahead of this agency or that country”.

So a lot of great things, but still a lot of work to do.

Pia:

Ok, so just briefly, give us a little bit of an overview of some of the work you’ve been doing, particularly some of the restructuring organisational restructuring that you did, and the impact that’s had now that you’re a little bit down the track.

Chris:

Well one of the things I started a few years ago in IT was to look at how IT was showing up for the rest of the organisation and we needed to change the way we were doing things. We no longer could create sustainable environments by thinking we had to build everything, we had to support everything.

So we moved not just into open data, but into open ecosystems, doing apps competitions, partnering with the local community.

Some of the people in IT are a little nervous because they think they’re going to have to support all these systems at the end of the day. We have made an aggressive move recently into the cloud, our council just two weeks ago approved our move to Gmail and Google Docs, so we’ll be moving off of our Microsoft relationship that we’ve had for 20 years into that new space.

And it’s not just about saving money, it’s about collaborating differently, sharing documents, having a single version of the truth, both within the City and within our partners and our agencies around the City.

So at the heart of it we really had to change the way we were showing up and being IT professionals and giving ourselves freedom to look at alternate solutions and be flexible.

And I hear a lot of people even talk about it here. IT people make a lot of change with systems and technology but at the root of it, they seem to be one group that is the hardest to accept change for themselves.

Pia:

Great, well thank you very much for your time and have a fantastic time in Australia.

Chris:

Great, thank you.

Short video with Andrew Stott transcript:

Pia:

OK, here I am speaking to Andrew Stott, the previous Director for Digital Engagement in the UK, and many other grand titles, I just want to have a chat to you today about how you’re finding FutureGov, and your thoughts on Gov 2.0 and what’s happening in Australia.

Andrew:

Right well, well as last time I was here there’s a lot of excitement about it. People are really starting to think about it, some interesting stuff going on. But still quite a way to go to get confidence in all departments to do it, and I hope people will pick up some of the things that have been done, innovative things that have been done in some departments and they need to think how they can apply it in their own.

Pia:

What have you seen the big changes since you were last here?

Andrew:

Ah, I think they’ve seen more in the sociel media space. I think obviously Queensland Police and things associated with the floods have really given a world class example of using social media. There’s been the data.gov.au refresh that’s happened and a few more data sets on that.

So you see the sort of green shoots coming through, now you’ve now got to think how you build on that and how you build the ecosystem of people and communities round that.

Pia:

And you spoke in your speech that we’ll make sure we link to in this about the importance of collaborating with the community. You wouldn’t mind touching on that a little for people?

Andrew:

Well I think one of the things we’ve learnt is that you’ve got to have the call for data as well as the push outwards, and actually just being presented with a file can be pretty daunting for a lot of people so it’s the support and documentation of that.

Really good stuff done by the Treasury who had an open day for developers using the Treasury COINS database. Got them in and people who produced the data explained how it worked, how it linked together. But then there’s also that ecosystem of entrepreneurs who build innovative businesses using the data.

But then, the big issue we haven’t really looked at yet is how can people feed changes to the data back into government, and I gave the example of where we used crowdsourcing to improve the data on bus stops.

But that was very much an ad hoc feedback, so do we make that feed of getting citizens helping government improve its data.
And on the social engagement, digital engagement side, the question is, we can collaborate but how does the government show it’s listening to that collaboration and taking action as a result of that.

Pia:

OK, and how do you think the UK is tracking, sort of a couple of years on in this. You guys have obviously been doing this since the Power Of Information Taskforce, so there’s a few years back there but how do you think it is tracking now?

Andrew:

I think we’re still learning as we go. Under the new government there’s been a period when transparency has been to the fore, so we’ve released a lot of new data that I think without that political will wouldn’t have been released.

I think we’re seeing new experiments in terms of crowdsourcing policy ideas through the Spending Challenge, Your Freedom, the Red Tape Challenge, and good old stalwarts of digital engagement like the epetition system are being re-energised and we heard today that they’ve now had 600,000 signatures since they’ve restarted.

Pia:

Brilliant. Well I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay in Australia and look forward to seeing you again.

Andrew:

OK, thank you.

In Australia in 2007, 9703 people were diagnosed with lung cancer and 7626 Australians died (Male 4715, Female 2911).

The Canberra vigil was held last night, and the group walked from Old Parliament House Rose Garden along Federation Mall to New Parliament House.

Shine a Light on Lung Cancer is made possible through a partnership with the Lung Cancer Alliance, a US based non-profit organisation dedicated solely to patient support and advocacy for people living with lung cancer and those at risk for the disease.

The Australian Lung Foundation was the first country outside the US to host the Shine a Light on Lung Cancer campaign.

Unfortunatley I was unable to get to the vigil, but I did get some photos of the very brave hundred-plus attendees who faced the rain to attend (see below).

This week is also Asbestos Awareness Week, which was marked tonight by the launch of the  Parliamentary Group on Asbestos Related Disease (PGARD) organised by co-chairs Senator Lisa Singh and Russell Broadbent MP and sponsored by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers.

When I was 16, I left school to work as a labourer doing asbestos removal work. Last night I caught up with some old friends from my time in the industry and the union, which was fantastic!

Asbestos has a dark legacy in Australia but together, especially through the ALF and PGARD we can ease the burden of asbestos exposure and other related lung cancer and disease by raising awareness and educating the community.

Kate

The roadshow headed down to the CSIRO/ANU after briefings in Parliament and then to Sydney, then Melbourne. Bell Labs have a remarkable history. Check out this list of innovations.

Kate

Click here to view the embedded video.

TRANSCRIPT

Kate Lundy: I’m here at the showcase for Bell Labs in the Mural Hall of Parliament House. It’s a great opportunity for us to see what Bell Labs have been doing, and with me is Alice White. She’s the Chief Scientist at Bell Labs. Welcome Alice, tell us a little bit about your work.

Alice White: Well I have been at Bell Laboratories for about 28 years, I’ve seen tremendous changes but most of my recent work has been in integrating optical functions onto a silicon chip.

Kate Lundy: That’s very exciting, and something I know there are businesses here in Australia that have described to me, “that’s the next space that they’d like their technologies to operate within and on”.

Alice White: I’m going to show you actually, I’ve got one here.

Kate Lundy: So this is it? Zoom in on this. It’s a very exciting piece of technology. Alice tell us a little bit about it.

Alice White: We call them photonic integrated circuits, PIC for short, and these are demultiplexers and multiplexers so what they’re doing is the chip actually takes multiple wavelenghts of light in and multiplexes them together onto the fibre and at the other end of the transmission system they demultiplexes them and separates them.

Kate Lundy: That’s exciting so at the moment what you’ve put on a chip is a component about so big, so this is a significant development.

Alice White: It means that we can produce them inexpensively and that they’re very compact so it’s going to I think revolutionise optical circuits.

Kate Lundy: That’s fantastic. And there are several other displays here, we’ll get some photos of it and post them on the website as well. Alice, you’ve been at Bell Labs for a while, you’ve at the top of the game, what’s it like, particularly being a woman in a tech job, and I know here in Australia women represent about 20% of the IT workplace.

Alice White: Well it’s a lot of fun to walk into a room and be introduced as the Chief Scientist, because the first reaction is a little bit step back, but science is an area where credibility is based on your ability to do science, and it’s a very objective field and so I’ve had a very very good career in it. I’ve had a chance to meet a lot of people and talk all around the world. The ability to communicate is very important in science and I think something women have an advantage in.

Kate Lundy: I agree, I think you will inspire a lot of Australian women to stick at it and stay with IT and look at the research fields because it’s something very important with the NBN coming.

Alice White: Yes, what an exciting opportunity for Australia. The whole world is watching.

Kate Lundy: Well, I’m excited about it. It makes Australia a network here that no other country can claim. We close the Digital Divide and having that available bandwidth will mean people will look to Australia for what is happening in the applications and services area.

Alice White: It’s a test bed. It’s absolutely a case of the state of the art.

Kate Lundy: OK, well it’s great to have you here in Australia and particularly here in Parliament House and congratulations on your career.

Alice White: Thank you, it’s been wonderful.

The Open Technology Foundation has been a couple of years in the making, and is an initiative about supporting the use of open technologies, methods and standards across governments. They have participation at federal and state level in Australia, as well as interest from governments overseas.

I think the OTF could be a really useful resource for Australian Governments at a federal, state and local level, not only with their use of ICT, but for the sort of cross-jurisdictional collaboration that will be vital in implementing the Gov 2.0 and open government agenda.

Andrew Mills, the CIO of the South Australian Government should be congratulated on his work in the early phases of  this initative, and Carnegie Mellon University (Australia) have shown leadership by taken a strong role in the implementation.

Open technologies, methods and standards all play an important role in the development of sustainable implementation strategies for open data, citizen-centric services and online public engagement.

I wish the OTF the best of luck and look forward to following their progress.

Further information about the Open Technology Foundation is available at http://otf.org.au

The launch event invitation is at http://www.cmu.edu.au/pdf/otf/OTF_invitation.pdf for those interested in coming along.

A few news articles and media releases about the initiative below:

• Open Technology Foundation and Carnegie Mellon University media release, including quotes from government participants
  http://www.cmu.edu.au/pdf/otf/OTF_PressRelease_August24_Final.pdf
• Terry Cutler to chair Open Technology Foundation (ITNews)
  http://www.itnews.com.au/News/267945,terry-cutler-to-chair-open-technology-foundation.aspx