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
I was originally going to write a post responding to the Federal Governments response to the Gov2au Taskforce final report and how it relates to Local Government. However I think one of the recommendations deserves its own post.
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?"
The South Australian Government has announced that it's going to be creating an Open Technology Foundation. From it's vision statement:
The OTF is committed to the evaluation and where proven, uptake of open technologies, standards and methods.
The OTF exists to help governments make better, more cost effective and innovative use of open technologies in order to improve service delivery to citizens.
You know I half expected to see this sort of story from here in Australia rather than the UK.
From this story the Royal Mail has moved to prevent a third party service from providing an API with up to date Postcode information sourced directly from the Royal Mail itself. This action has had a domino effect, causing issues with those sites that had come to rely on the third party service.
