I also want to thank my amazing adviser Pia Waugh and acknowledge the enormous contribution she has made in a very short period of time! My new website, the public spheres, including the wiki are true innovations in consultative political processes  and I am really thrilled with the attention they are receiving. It’s attention not just for the issues we are exploring, such as high bandwidth networks (Publicshere#1) and government 2.0 (Publicsphere#2), but the way in which we are going about it.

For me, it has been very positive and I am inspired by the constructive participation it has generated.

Kate

Click here to view the embedded video.

Please find the finalised briefing paper on the wiki, or download the pdf version which is much nicer to read.

Handing over the briefing paper from Public Sphere 1: High Speed Bandwidth

Note: the content on the screen wasn’t clear in the photo, so it has been slightly edited to include the screenshot.

Below is the transcript for the video of the questions asked by Senator Kate Lundy at Senate Estimates about the Public Sphere feedback. Please see the original transcript from Hansard for more details.

Senate Estimates
Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Tuesday 26th May
2.02pm

Senator LUNDY —The first questions I have relate to the digital economy consultation process. I note that the consultation draft for the Digital Economy Future Directions paper was released late last year and that submissions to that draft consultation paper closed on 11 February. How many submissions were received? What is the time frame now for the consideration of those submissions and the release of the final paper?

Mr Cameron —You are correct. The consultation paper of the Digital Economy Future Directions paper was released late last year. That in fact followed a number of other consultation processes, including three industry workshops and a forum that the minister held in September. Over 110 submissions were received by the department in relation to the consultation paper. All of those submissions, with the exception of a small number where the submitters requested confidentiality, have been put up on the department’s website. The department has been carefully reviewing those submissions and, subject to decisions of government, we expect that the final future directions paper will be released in the middle of this year.

Senator LUNDY —As far as the online forum that was conducted is concerned, what sort of activity can you report that occurred on the blog associated with that online forum around the future directions paper?

Mr Cameron —A blog was run for a three-week period in December of last year. I think it was for less than three weeks. During the course of that blog, 2,456 comments were received in relation to a number of subject topics that were put up over the course of the blog. Those comments covered a large range of issues and the comments made have been another useful source of information and commentary for the purposes of the future directions document.

Senator LUNDY —Were there any other sources of information? You have mentioned three industry consultations, the online forum and associated blog and the submissions. Are there any other resources you are drawing on?

Mr Cameron —They were the formal consultation mechanisms.

Senator Conroy —We had the three workshops and then we had the broader forum. That was for the work from the workshops.

Mr Cameron —That is correct.

Senator LUNDY —That was not just an online forum; there was an actual forum as well?

Senator Conroy —There was an actual forum as well.

Senator LUNDY —That is what I thought.

Mr Cameron —Clearly the department continues to engage with interested parties and industry associations as we work through the sorts of issues that have been raised through each of those formal processes.

Senator LUNDY —I am interested to explore that further. For example, for groups or organisations or even individuals who have ideas about how to progress our digital future—and I should say that I conducted such a forum myself called Public Sphere—I want to get an idea from the department or indeed the minister as to the best way to forward those ideas to your office to form part of those considerations. What sort of processes or formats are you looking for putting those ideas and I guess input in?

Mr Cameron —The department would welcome continued engagement from interested parties on these issues in the future. I think one of the key points about the digital economy is that it is highly dynamic in its nature as to the way in which it is transforming people’s engagement with technology in their social lives as well as their economic lives. It is something which is evolving quite rapidly and we recognise that it is important for there to be an ongoing discussion. The future directions paper is written and is conceived as the beginning, or part of the beginning, of an ongoing process of conversation. We would welcome people approaching the department either directly or through the minister with written ideas or by giving us the opportunity for us to meet with them to talk through those sorts of ideas. If relevant we can incorporate them into the future directions document or they can be part of the ongoing work of our engagement on these issues.

Senator Conroy —Can I endorse what Mr Cameron said. We welcome all input. Congratulations to everyone, including Senator Lundy, for organising forums. We welcome absolutely ongoing participation. With the incredible speed with which technology and ideas are developing in this sector, we must remain in regular contact. We try to meet as many people as we can. I am sure we do not meet everyone who would like to meet us. There are only so many hours in a day. But with all the technology—the blog, the departmental website—and the reorganisation of the department, which I think should be noted, to give a greater focus to the digital economy area we are very keen for all of that input to keep coming in through yourself, my office, the department or in any way that people can.

Senator LUNDY —Thank you for that. Obviously I think it is a really important opportunity. Particularly with the prospects of the NBN, I know that there is a great deal of interest with people preparing for a high bandwidth environment and really wanting to optimise what it means. You just mentioned restructuring the department to put a greater emphasis on it. Can I get you to outline that briefly and give details about who the contact point or where the contact point would be within that area of the department for these ideas?

Mr Cameron —As the secretary and I indicated earlier in the hearings, the department is being reorganised into three broad program groups, one of which is a group identified as the Digital Economy and Services Group, which establishes two divisions that will focus essentially on the services delivered over communications networks. In this day and age this is increasingly being fundamentally over broadband networks. That group will focus not only on some of the broad and high level policy issues associated with the evolving digital economy but also administers and delivers a range of program initiatives designed to facilitate access to broadband services and facilitate more innovative use of those services. In fact there have been discussions on some of those programs like the ABG Digital Regions initiative and NICTA during the course of the hearings this morning.

That reorganisation does bring together the range of parts of the department that deal directly with the service layer of a converged world which essentially is the digital economy. In terms of the future directions document, my division has primary responsibility for driving that process and Mia Garlick is the assistant secretary who will as of Monday be heading up our Digital Economy and Convergent Strategy Branch. Both myself and Ms Garlick are probably the most appropriate starting points for people who wish to contact us on those sorts of issues.

Senator LUNDY —Thank you for that. That is very helpful and I will be taking up that offer. Before I conclude, can I move briefly on to a couple of other issues in 1.2. One of them relates to a TIO program which I think was called the Connect Resolve Campaign. What did that involve and what is its status?

Mr Besgrove —The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman is an industry funded body which investigates complaints raised against carriers by communications consumers throughout Australia. The way in which the TIO is funded is entirely a function of the volume of those complaints. The TIO has become increasingly concerned over the last couple of years that it found itself growing because the number of complaints were in fact growing quite substantially both as to volume of individual complaints and the range of issues that consumers were raising when they did make those complaints. I should add that complaints which go to the TIO are very frequently those where consumers have not been able to get satisfaction from the carriers in the first instance. The TIO is what is known as the elevated complaints organisation for these purposes.

The TIO decided to embark upon a more ambitious awareness-raising and publicising campaign called Connect Resolve, which it launched last year. The minister participated in the launch of that campaign. It runs over the remainder of the financial year, so it is getting close to its initial conclusion. The purpose of the Connect Resolve campaign is to increase both consumer awareness of the sorts of recourses they may have if they have concerns in relation to their carrier’s performance but more importantly it is deliberately designed to engage with senior management of the carriers throughout Australia.

I think it is fair to say that a combination of the efforts of the TIO combined with a number of public pronouncements which the minister has made, along with other interactions which the minister and the department have had with the industry, have certainly caught their attention. It is certainly the case that the carriers are now adopting a range of measures to deliberately try to train their front-line staff. We have examples from several of the carriers of quite explicit training initiatives to try to enable front-line staff to be able to resolve complaints by customers much more quickly. We also have a number of undertakings from the CEOs of some of the carriers indicating quite clearly to the minister that they are in fact actively engaged in responding to these issues. We are I guess guardedly optimistic that this might be getting somewhere.

Senator LUNDY —For people who want to be part of Connect Resolve or who may have a connection complaint that they have not had resolved is it just a question of using the TIO website and the normal processes to make contact?

Mr Besgrove —The TIO website is a good place to start. But what the TIO will usually ask is: have you first spoken to your carrier? If the carriers were here they would say that they already deal with a very large volume of complaints which never go beyond them because they are able to resolve them. The TIO is really there to investigate and seek solutions to more complex or more intractable problems.

The concern which the department has had is that, despite that, the volume of complaints going to the TIO has been increasing year after year. I have referred a couple of times to the mobile premium services issue. That was a good example where it received much more attention over the last 18 months in part because of the very significant spike in complaints. At one point the TIO were fielding about 3,000 complaints a month.

Senator MINCHIN —I am sorry to interrupt, but it is after 2.15 on the second day and we have not touched on the NBN—

Senator LUNDY —I just wanted to place one more question on notice. I am very conscious of the time. I did say I would only take about 15 minutes. Could you take on notice providing information about TIO complaints relating to pair gain systems? I still get complaints about people who cannot access ADSL services because of the existence of pair gain systems and the trouble they have getting that resolved. I am interested to follow that up from the TIO’s perspective.

Mr Besgrove —Certainly.

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.

A “Public Sphere” is a space that “…through the vehicle of public opinion it puts the state in touch with the needs of society” [2]. This kind of engagement in public policy is a great way to represent different views and harness a broad range of expertise, particularly on topical issues of the day.

Although there are certainly many formal mechanisms for participation in Australian Government processes, we thought it would be a great idea to create an online public sphere and facilitate regular topics of interest to both the general public and to the government. This way people from all around Australia can participate online. We will be experimenting with different technologies to get the recipe right for this kind of engagement, and any thoughts on this are very welcome.

Each Public Sphere will run for two weeks, and then all feedback will be summarised per topic and put into briefing papers that we will make available on this website and to the appropriate channels in government.

There will also be a Public Sphere workshop per topic (likely every 4 – 6 weeks) which will give a physical place for people to speak about their ideas in concise 10 minutes talks. We intend to stream the talks online for general public access. Feedback and questions will happen live over Twitter both from the participants in the room and from remote participants. We were very impressed with the recent use of this at the ATUG conference and wanted to give it a go in order to balance the benefits of online and offline approaches.

For our first Public Sphere topic, we thought we would choose High Bandwidth in Australia. This topic is not going to cover the recently announced National Broadband Network or implementation details for high bandwidth in Australia, but rather a discussion about what high bandwidth can do for Australian society, business and government.

How to participate in a Public Sphere:

• Post comments, links to papers, case studies and ideas to the blog post comments – comments will be summarised and presented at the event as part of the proceedings
• Blog with the tag publicsphere or Public Sphere and Twitter with #publicsphere so we can find your ideas and post them below
• Run your own events and post your outcomes here in the comments
• Join us for our short workshop event, which will be streamed online so you can participate remotely
• Volunteer to give a (maximum) 10 minute talk at the workshop by adding your name and topic to the comments at the bottom of this post

We’ll do our best to put together a programme of thought-provoking speakers for the day, and look forward to your participation, online or in person for this Public Sphere topic.

Workshop details

• Topic: The opportunities and issues around getting high speed bandwidth in Australia
• Schedule: Please see below
• Place: Australia National University, Seminar Room 101, in the Department of Computer Science Ground Floor. See the Google Map.
• Internet: Will of course be available for attendees, details on the day.
• Coffee and refreshments: Available for sale at the Purple Pickle right next to the venue.
• Parking or Transport: Parking at ANU during term can be difficult, so please check out the visitor parking map and the available bus routes to the ANU.
  
• Date: 7th May
• Time: 8.30am for a 9am start till 12pm
• Agenda: To be published by 5th May, but short 10 minute talks with simultaneous online discussion and questions
• Social Media: Twitter: #publicsphere or blog: publicsphere or ”Public Sphere”. Post questions on the day to @katelundy
• Video/audio stream for the day: http://dld.anu.edu.au/public-sphere - please note there is a  short lag on the video stream. An enormous thanks to George Bray and Bob Edwards for coordinating the video streaming, and venue.
• Online Participation: via Twitter using #publicsphere as the tag. Participants both in the room and remotely will post questions to @katelundy and comments and feedback on the content as it is being presented to #publicsphere. Speakers will see the questions as they come up and be able to deal with them either throughout their talk, or at the end. By driving everything through Twitter we hope to effectively be able to both encourage and capture different perspectives from all participants, local and remote.

UPDATE: RSVP was via a webform below, but please continue to contribute talk proposals, comments and other input to the comments section at the end of this post.

Please note, our current moderation policy on comments is full moderation as this site is only a week old, but we will ensure comments are moderated as soon as possible (within an hour or two). This policy will be changed in the coming weeks as per the moderation policy.

Quotes

[1] Hauser, Gerard (June 1998), p 83. “Vernacular Dialogue and the Rhetoricality of Public Opinion”. Communication Monographs 65 (2): 83–107 Page. 86. ISSN 0363-7751.

[2] Habermas, Jürgen (German(1962 - English Translation 1989), p 31. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press. p. 30. ISBN 0-262-58108-6.

Schedule

Pre-recorded sessions marked with an *

• 0830 Coffee at the Purple Pickle next door to venue
• 0900 Introduction and comments – Senator Lundy
• 0910 The ‘unexplored country’ we will be entering with high speed broadband – Craig Thomler. Presentation slides.
• 0920 Green ICT – Tom Worthington. Presentation slides
• 0930 Building a Smarter Planet – what is happening in the digital world to build a digital economy and the imperative that we harness technology to position Australia for the challenges it is facing – Judy Anderson (IBM). Presentation slides (20MB)
• 0940 Opportunities for online collaboration over long distances with high speed broadband * – James Purser. Youtube and presentation slides.
• 1000 Public empowerment through public engagement with government at all levels – Stephen Collins. Presentation Paper.
• 1010 Citizen engagement and community participation online: The Canadian experience – Michael De Percy. Presentation slides.
• 1020 Government service delivery in the new contexts of (a) broadband, (b) highly diverse access devices, (c) highly diverse patterns of use, and (d) highly diverse human needs – Roger Clarke. Presentation paper.
• 1030 Short coffee break
• 1040 Rural and regional accessibility in regard to accessing agricultural and environmental information for those working on research and on-ground change – Nerida Hart. Links for her work at the Regional Knowledge Resource Kit, NRM Navigator & Knowledge for Regional Natural Resource Management
• 1050 Human factors in broadband telehealth – Duncan Stevenson. Supporting documentation.
• 1100 Online video publishing possibilities and technology needs – Dr Silvia Pfeiffer. Blog post
• 1110 Privacy and filtering * – David Vaile. Presentation video and on Youtube.
• 1120 The successfully rollout of FTTH in an Australian regional town and how it expands towns with populations of a few hundred, to hundreds of thounsands. Also the economic modeling required – Adrian Blake. Presentation slides
• 1130 High Bandwidth – getting things done: particularly in respect to dealing with complex real world problems, emergency management and dealing with skills shortages. This is relevant to both the commercial and community sectors – James Dellow. Presentation slides.
• 1140 Brief presentation on perspectives put forward on the blog for comment – Pia Waugh
• 1155 Thanks and close of event

UPDATE: The video of the event was streamed online, however unfortunately the recording failed. We shall fix this for the next Public Sphere event, however Craig Thomler – one of the attendees – did an excellent live blog during the event that covered a lot of the content. In the comments below are links to many other blogs and other perspectives related to the event and the topic. Thank you everyone for your contributions.

Updates:

1. Rusty Russell had to cancel his session on The impact of high speed bandwidth on the music and film industry due to a work commitment. Dr Silvia Pfeiffer will be covering a little of this ground.
2. Andrew Boyd had to cancel his session Making government accessible due to technical difficulties.
3. Jeff Waugh had to cancel his talk. Replaced by Duncan Stevenson. Personal Publishing, Archival and the Consequences of Upstream (bandwidth)