For those of you who made it, we do hope you enjoyed it, and found it useful. For those of you who couldn’t make it, never fear, content is here! Check out the conference site for presentations and selected Audio. Sessions available include the opening keynote from Senator Kate Lundy,  as well as the lightening talks from staff at councils. You can also check out some pictures on Flickr!

We’re really looking forward to next year, and are very keen for you to be more involved, so don’t be shy, get in touch, let us know what you’re interested in and want to see at the conference next year, or if you want to help out.

Conference highlights include:

• Keynotes from Senator Kate Lundy and Mark Pesce
• Plenary session from Jason Ryan
• Panel session on online community engagement with panel members from local and state government, and industry.
• Government 2.0 Taskforce workshop with Lisa Harvey

We also have a choice of 6 workshops from the basics of writing for the web, the essentials of Information Architecture, WCAG 2.0, user-centred design you techniques you can do yourself, and you can get into some coding techniques with Real world CSS, and an Introduction to JavaScript.

To help convince you, here’s me being interviewed by James Dellow giving the low-down on this year’s conference.

Diana Mounter on the upcoming Local Government Web Network Conference from James Dellow on Vimeo.

So it’s a mixed bag when you look at New South Wales as a whole, and this is not surprising with the huge regional diversity we have (as we do around the whole of Australia). Another big factor being the lack of fast broadband, which makes it difficult for councils to make their websites an important part of the services they provide their communities, and as a key community engagement tool. But Reem are excited by the individuals we’ve met and are connecting with through our network, and new networks and events such as Public Sphere. You can feel that there is a change happening from within and at the top of government, and it looks like we’re all starting to head in the right direction in realising the potential of the web. We’re collaborating, sharing our ideas, and beginning to build our Government 2.0.

The second Public Sphere hosted by Senator Kate Lundy is focussing on Government 2.0: Policy and Practice will be taking place in Canberra at Parliament house on Monday 22 June. Tickets sold out quickly but you can participate online – there will be a live video feed, live blogging and an accompanying Twitterfeed with hashtag #publicsphere.

Reem and I will be presenting a quick 10 minute presentation on Challenges in Local Government. See our presentation below, and other Public Sphere presentations on Slideshare.

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/

If you’ve been to one before then you’ll understand my excitement. If not then here’s why you should go:

• You’ll meet a whole new load of awesome, talented, creative, web peeps
• You will here some great presentations on the mad stuff people are doing
• You won’t get bored by long droll presentations cos each presenter only has 3 minutes to wow you with their cool shiz
• If you’ve been secretly working on something the world (or at least a room full) should know about then this is your chance to get up and “Jam” about what you’ve been working on
• It’s at a bar so you can have a beer (which might be nice if you feel like relaxing after a day at Web Directions)

Thanks to misswired for the photo.

Be part of the local web community and come to Webjam 8 on 25 September and watch and learn or present, and have fun (and tell your webby friends about it).

I’ll be there, hope to see you there too.