Two weeks ago the 4th annual Local Government Web Network Conference was held and it was good.
Organised by Reem Abdelatey of the Local Government and Shires Associations, the conference is Australias only grass roots event with a focus on Local Government use of the internet.
Well once again it has been a little while since I last blogged here, so best I bring things up to speed a bit.
The Site
I've added a new page to the site:
Basically some of the excellent people I've been working with lately.
IKEN
Tomorrow morning I'm going to be heading in to Parliament House in Canberra to attend Microsofts Politics and Technology Forum.
A half day event, it's going to be keynoted by british poli-blogger and radio personality Iain Dale and then we'll get a panel discussion regarding politics and tech in Australia.
I'll be tweeting under the hashtag #poltech
Despite the fact that the congress still seems set to close down the raft of open gov sites setup under the Obama administration, there is a little good news.
The code behind itdashboard.gov has been released to the world through an account on the venerable (and surprisingly still going) Sourceforce.
Hot on the heals of the announced cuts to the US online transparency programme comes another example of "How not to do Gov2.0"
For those of you who may not be aware, the New Zealand city of Christchurch suffered a large earth quake (6.1 on the scale) back in late February, causing wide spread damage and taking the lives of 166 people. Very soon after the earthquake hit, the government went into action to manage the disaster, and number of volunteer groups stepped up to the plate to assist the people of Christchurch.
Once again someone is doing it wrong on the internet and I feel I need to point it out.
In this case, the someone is the United States congress, which as part of its budgetary battle with the whitehouse has decided to reduce funding for a range of Gov2.0/Open Government initiatives from $34million to $2million.
For the last two days a volcano in Iceland has been spewing ash and rock high into the atmosphere with little indication that it is going to stop any time soon.
The danger that the ash presents to aircraft (the particles are so fine and sharp they can destroy a jet engine) combined with the prevailing jet stream has meant that essentially then entire European air space has been shutdown. This has left hundreds of thousands of people stranded across Europe and further afield.
If you haven't heard, the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has been to see the Queen about an election. Having done that, the British Government is now in what's called Caretaker mode.
For the past three weeks I've been taking part in something call Local Gov Chat on twitter. It's a twitter based moderated conversation on the subject of Local Government and various tech and cultural issues.
One of the questions that came up this afternoon was an interesting one:
"What is the difference between openness and transparency?"
Let's see, the last time I posted a blog here, I was giving the Royal Post a deserved kicking for their overly restrictive control of the postcode information relied upon by third party services such as Planning Alerts UK.
This time round I bring good news from Merry Old England.
