I had a most insightful weekend. On Saturday while Australia’s 2020 summit was on, a few kilometers away Canberra’s first barcamp was also in progress. When the initial outcomes of the summit were released it didn’t come as a surprise that some of the discussion streams in the 2020 summit overlapped with what the open source enthusiasts, techies and futurists were talking about at the barcamp.

Here are some interesting snippets from the various summit streams that also overlapped with topics at Barcamp:

Many submissions in this stream highlighted the need for improved access to appropriate technologies in order to improve customer services, business productivity and the delivery of government services.

intellectual property law to keep pace with technology, to ensure greater sharing without infringing the rights of others

Creative Commons licensing was brought up several times during the Barcamp in relation to access to tax payer funded government data. CC is currently seen as the most logical alternative to current licensing schemes for access to information in government. All presentations at Barcamp itself are offcourse available under CC licence to the world.

But licensing alone cannot change things. Government also needs to change the way it makes this data available. The trend toward Sematic Web and open interfaces and APIs needs to be adopted in government if this particular aim is to become a reality. My interaction with government thus far has seen a marked resistance to emerging technologies, sometimes due to practical reasons such as cost and risk. However, under the submission for “Towards a Creative Australia” there is a point under top ideas to “Develop new investment and support models” which if adopted as a policy can encourage IT departments in Government to overcome these inhibitions:

Fund creative endeavours through a 1% creative dividend from all Government Departments for expenditure on arts (including design, performance, installation)

Perhaps this can be extended to the idea of making data available for creative endeavours by the public. It should be trivial to design these systems such that they monitor the quantity and nature of their usage. According to the summit

It was agreed that comprehensive improvements in environmental data and statistics were necessary to enable better management

If IT departments in government get rewarded for sharing their data the quality of the data is also likely to improve – many eyeballs are better than two.

At the Barcamp my faviourite talk of the day would have to be beautiful web typography 7 tips on desucking the web by Simon Pascal http://klepas.org/ apparently he has also submitted a new OpenStreeMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/) logo, really looking forward to seeing that.

Futurist Janine (http://www.futurejourneys.com) spoke about her projects that merge virtual and physical space. She mentioned these guys who are involved with some very interesting projects. For example http://blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html which allows on-line gamers to share their space with people in the physical world. Interaction between these two groups takes many forms for example may be chased by people in the virtual world. The project is related and I suspect may even be connected with a talk at this years Where2.0 — Beg, Borrow and Steal: Make a Simple GPS Game. Looking forward to that next month.

Another talk that I missed but later caught up on slideshare was Ruth’s Gordan Ramsy’s Kitchen.

There were lots more talks all very interesting you can check em out on the wiki. ANU’s generosity has to be commended for letting the community use their facilities on the weekend. And it goes without saying UnOrganisers and sponsors rule!

Last weekend the 2020 Summit was held in Canberra where government and leading Australian minds got together to come up with ideas to address future issues that Australia faces. Here’s my biased top 10 ideas:

1. “national financial literacy program in schools”
2. “environmental considerations will be fully integrated into economic decision making in Australia”
3. “robust emissions trading system and a suite of complementary measures will be driving a low carbon revolution with Government taking the lead working in partnership with business and the community”
4. “make government funding of certain public or research projects conditional on providing open public access to reports and data”
5. “require carbon neutrality for all new buildings constructed beyond 2020″
6. “federal government should commission a total soil and hydrological survey of north and north-west Australia by 2010, to inform future production opportunities”
7. “in classrooms across Australia, children should be encouraged to grow something real”
8. “encourage student exchange between schools in urban and regional areas”
9. “delivering “fast fruit” to primary schools”
10. “provision of micro-finance on a nation-wide scale”

Others that I liked:

• “exploit broadband and emerging IT technologies to enable new forms of citizen involvement”
• “an online Citizens’ Cabinet”
• “open access to Government information (complete reform of FOI laws) and strengthen protections of free press in order to facilitate a more open and publicly accountable government”
  – I wonder if they know about http://openaustralia.org - ruby/rails app :)
• “reciprocal relationships of both citizen and government”
• “digitise the collections of major national institutions by 2020″
• “one-stop shop” for the delivery of government and community services..
• “australia’s ecological systems will be improved. The health of our river and groundwater systems will be managed to achieve ecological sustainability, supporting food and fibre production and resilient communities. Australia will also have become a global leader in tropical water system conservation and sustainability.

On this last point citizen collaboration and participation can make this task more achievable. Australia can learn a great deal from projects like http://eol.org. Getting a complete inventory of our Biological and Ecological resources can be better accomplished if we allow channels for ordinary Australians to contribute to our Biodiversity data inventory.