Welcome to the Public Sphere

Recently, Kate Lundy, Senator for the ACT, launched a new initiative called “Public Sphere” to engage with the community on topics of national interest. The concept aims to bring people together online to share their views on various topics, in addition to hosting a physical meet up that is live streamed over the Internet. The meet up allows people to give their two cents in short ten minute presentations on whatever aspect of the topic they choose, either in person, via skype, YouTube or other means. Each Public Sphere runs for two weeks and all feedback from the presentations, comments on the blog, via Twitter and any other contributions will be collated into briefing papers and distributed to members of parliament and available to the public. The first of these workshops on the topic of “High Bandwidth in Australia” was held on Thursday 7 May in Canberra and I was lucky enough to be able to watch the live stream and participate via Twitter. To provide clarity, it was made clear that this topic was not about the national broadband initiative or any implementation details, rather the focus was on the possibilities high bandwidth offers communities, business and individuals. The range of people presenting was impressive, and the topics were diverse. There were a couple of presentations that caught my eye. The first was by Roger Clarke an academic and consultant who talked about 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. I thought this was a really valuable presentation to make us actually stop and assess what we're trying to do with regard to opening up government, and really thinking about the way different people and groups use different types of technology. Another stand out presentation for me was by Adrian Blake. Adrian was responsible for creating a broadband network in Cooma using a shared trenching arrangement with AGL. Now most of this was very technical and well over my head, but really highlights how one small company working collaboratively with the support of the community can build their own network. It really highlighted for me the failings of Federal Government’s broadband policy, because if this guy can do it, around 10 years ago, how come the Federal Government can’t do it!? Adrian's slides are available as a pdf. This was a brilliant workshop, and I found the presentations diverse and really engaging. Other standouts were James Purser talking about opportunities for online collaboration. James' Youtube video and James' slides, and Michael De Percy talking about citizen engagement and community participation online in Canada in comparison with the Australian experience. Here are Michael's slides. Thanks to Kate Lundy (@KateLundy) and her advisor Pia Waugh (@PiaWaugh) for getting this concept up and running so quickly and so successfully. I’m really looking forward to the conversations that Public Sphere has and will generate, and the model it provides for Local Government in engaging the community. For a full agenda and presentations please check out Kate Lundy's blog. Update! The Public Sphere Wiki has now been set up and is open to contributions:

http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/05/27/draft-briefing-paper-from-public-sphere-topic-high-speed-bandwidth/ http://wiki.katelundy.com.au/PublicSphere1 We would love all participants to look over our briefing paper and contribute. We have tried to keep it simple and easy to read/scan with the ability to use the reference materials to get further information on any particular topic. It is a first attempt at a format for the Public Sphere, so if you can think of a better way to format the outcomes, we'd love to hear about it (or you can just do it). The wiki page will be publicly editable for a week (instructions on the page) and then we'll clean it up for final publishing. Depending on how a week plays out, we may extend this timing for future draft processes (as our main target audience for the edits are the participants in the topic, however anyone can obviously contribute to the briefing paper). We would expect any further commentary on the briefing paper to be made on the blog post where we post the final version. The wiki page (and all edits) will remain publicly available. We have also linked as much reference material (videos, slides, websites) from the original event schedule if you are looking for any of this material: http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/04/29/public-sphere-1-high-bandwidth-for-australia/