Five fulcrums for fundamental public sector reform

In government we often speak about policy levers, but in the real world, a lever without a fulcrum is just a plank of wood. Levers are needed to lift a load, but without a fulcrum, you can’t move it very far. Fulcrums are needed to dramatically increase the impact of a lever without having to increase the effort/resource. Basically, levers without fulcrums are pretty ineffective.

Sometimes even ambitious change agendas can unintentionally adopt a levers-without-fulcrums pattern. For instance, setting up a team to innovate without normalising a culture of innovation across the organisation. Hiring or training extraordinary talent and then not letting them make any decisions or bring ideas to the table. Training staff on public engagement without creating an appetite for public input. Every lever needs a fulcrum.

Once you look for it, you can see this pattern everywhere.

So below are five of my favourite fulcrums to complement the usual policy levers you have today 😊 These are all tried and tested in various governments. These fulcrums are: teaching public sector craft to all who work in (and with) the public sector, a responsible implementation mindset, servant leadership, structuring around outcomes, and finally the critical fulcrum of raised expectations.

Fulcrum 1: Teaching public service craft to all involved

All public servants used to be trained in public service craft. At some point, about 30 years ago, there was a change that mechanised the public sector (driven by New Public Management) and started bringing people in for a particular skillset (developer, accountant, lawyer, project manager, etc) with limited training on the context in which they’d be applying those skills. These days, generally only policy people are expected to be ‘trained’ in the ways of government, and even then, many public policy courses teach only the mechanics of public sector without the responsibilities or clear delineation of powers and accountabilities.

We have seen the results of this in shocking testimony throughout the Robodebt Royal Commission, as senior public servants demonstrated a complete misunderstanding (and sometimes abdication) of their responsibility to be trusted stewards acting both lawfully and in the best public interest, instead believing their job to just advise, and then loyally (blindly?) implement the decisions of the government of the day, whatever the cost, conflict, impact or legality. This culture issue is well articulated in the recent submission to the Robodebt Royal Commission by the UNSW Allens Hub and Australasian Society for Computers and the Law.

Similarly, political staffers need to be trained on the responsibilities, dignity and accountabilities of being in office (whether in Government or Opposition), and should be taught what a healthy relationship between Ministerial offices and departments looks like, as has been well articulated in Professor Andrew Podger’s well written recent analysis.

The reason public sector craft should be taught to all public servants, at all levels, is to ensure that everyone knows what good, responsible, ethical and lawful governance looks like, and is able to identify and hold the line when required. This ensures that good and high integrity governance weathers the storms of political change, while being capable of maintaining the trust and confidence of the Government, the Parliament and the People, because there is significant benefit in equally serving all three masters.

Fulcrum 2: A “responsible implementation” mindset

“Frank advice, fearless stewardship, responsible implementation”

There is a LOT of decision making to be made that doesn’t require Ministerial approval, where public servants at all levels can and should confidently exercise their delegations in accordance with the mandate and legislation.

Personally, I would like to change the old saying from “frank and fearless advice” to “frank advice, fearless stewardship, responsible implementation”, to help public servants, particularly policy folk, to realise the job is more than an advisory one. Stewardship is being added to the APS Values and will help ensure a more sustainable and public good mindset across the senior executive. Implementation is always where impact is felt, so responsible implementation is frankly more critical than good advice. Fearlessness should be about how the sector is maintaining its balance, integrity and trustworthiness in the face of adversity, influence and power.

In any case, the Government of the day generally only tweaks a small proportion of the whole mandate of the public sector, but public servants are expected to lawfully and responsibly administer all their obligations, not just the policy agenda of the Government of the day. Ministers (and Governments) can and do set “Big P” Policy, but where that policy conflicts with the law, legislation, constitution or frankly, with public benefit, then public servants have a responsibility to say no, not to just offer more advice but implement anyway.

The lack of training from fulcrum 1 has led to a situation where many public servants and ministerial staffers don’t know how they should interact. For instance, Ministers should ideally identify outcomes they wish to achieve, and ask departments to provide analysis and options, but Minister’s generally shouldn’t dictate solutions or delivery. Departments have a whole mandate to deliver outside of the Minister’s objectives, found in the legislative and constitutional foundations of the portfolio. Below is a little diagram I made to help folk understand where authorities lie and the actors and change mechanisms required for each. For example, there is significant authority and decision making around the operational policies and program implementation in the department itself, which doesn’t require continual Ministerial approvals.

Policy authority and decision making (in the public sector). The diagram is a table of three columns: Actors; Instruments of Change; and Authority. The rows are different layers of decision making in government, starting with 1) the Constitution, for which the instrument of change is referenda and the actor is the people of Australia; 2) Legislation, for which the instrument of change is bills/acts and the actor is the parliament; 3) Big P Policy, for which the instrument of change is directions the Minister's office and the actor is the government of the day; 4) Operational policies, for which the instrument of change is departmenal approval and the actor is the Secretary; and finally 5) Implementation, program planning and delivery, for which the instrument of change is internal processes and the actor is department executives and their delegates. This diagram is meant to communicate that the direction from the Minister's office is only a small part of the picture, and departments have a large playground of delegated authority and decision making that they should be exercising in order to delivery responsible government, and that there are two levels of authority above the Ministerial objectives, and departments should ensure they are always operating within the mandate and authority of the Constitution and existing legislation.

If more public servants used their full delegation to genuinely, openly and confidently serve the public, and refer continually to the mandate laid out in constitution and legislation, we would have better governance, improved public trust and dramatically better public outcomes.

Fulcrum 3: Servant Leadership

When I started working in the NSW Government as a senior executive, my new team asked me on my first day what my success criteria for them was. I thought for a moment, and answered: 1) that was have a measurably beneficial impact for the people/communities we serve; 2) that we are looked to and considered exemplars for how we work, not just what we deliver; and 3) that everyone in the team has joy every day at work. I truly believe that people should leave every workplace better than when they started.

Joy is a wonderful indicator for when people feel heard, empowered, working on meaningful stuff and valued. It shows people are busy but not burned out, delivering value and getting the balance roughly right. In the public sector where many people are driven by a deep desire to do good, joy is enabled by embracing and supporting that desire, and helping people bring their whole creative and brilliant selves to the job. An empowered and joyful team is a force of nature. So why are so many teams not joyful?

It is no secret that public sector leadership in recent decades has slowly devolved into a murky soup of micromanagement, distrust and politicisation. This is not because we have magically attracted such individuals pre-formed, but rather because we have normalised an executive environment with training and incentives that drives and rewards these behaviours. When a leader, at any level (team, branch, division, department) see their job as “managing” people, there is an inherently disrespectful and toxic presumption that people are not willing or capable of managing themselves. “Managing” people quickly leads to micromanaging people, leading to a very real sense of helplessness and disempowerment across the service.

People rising through the ranks have also been taught that “expertise” is a dirty word, and to really get anywhere you should become a “generalist”. This has led to an unhealthy and internalised disregard of internal experts, and mutual incomprehension between decision makers and those with the experience and expertise needed to inform decisions.

Equally problematic is the lack of public sector leadership development. Executives are often promoted or recruited through being highly capable at doing, but are not then taught how to empower others. Many courses teach execs to distrust their staff, to allocate tasks rather than outcomes, to focus on efficiency rather than public or policy outcomes, and to reward compliance over creativity.

There are solutions though. I have seen and adopted ”Servant Leadership” as a powerful and effective fulcrum to shift and improve leadership culture in many public sectors around the world. It provides both a mindset/cultural shift and a method for building high performing teams capable of delivering real impact. Servant leadership reframes “leadership” as the act of empowering and supporting people to succeed, growing the confidence of staff and improving their capability and confidence to deliver.

Product management, done well, provides a good test for Servant Leaders. A senior program or project owner needs to be able to delegate decision making to product owners and managers, and to oversee and guide rather than direct. When product teams lose (or never truly gain) delegation of decision making, they are unable to design, deliver, manage, continuously improve or pivot products in response to changing needs or policy.

Servant leadership creates an active practice of listening, enabling and encouraging all staff to bring their best selves, creating the possibility of high performing and sustainable teams that can work smarter across disciplines, and can innovate and engage. Servant leadership actively delegates down, supporting staff to own outcomes along with relevant decision making to be at the right level, a critical requirement for better policy and service delivery outcomes.

Fulcrum 4: Structuring around outcomes

Whilst ever public servants have to provide a cost centre just to talk to each other (let alone work together), we will continue to see structural segmentation of disciplines, and a structural inability to be outcomes driven. There are small ways to structure around outcomes, even within highly segmented structures, like funding an outcome under one cost centre, and bringing together all the capabilities required for that outcome (rather than begging, borrowing, seconding, stealing or journaling), and building different disciplines and capability uplift into your project and programme budgets (such as 0.2 FTE from policy, or secondees from the frontline, or funding for service design that includes training for internal staff to learn for next time).

Whenever I build a government program, I ensure we identify and budget for the minimum viable set of capabilities to deliver the outcome end to end. We can always supplement with collaborations, vendors, partnerships, etc, but without the minimum viable capabilities represented in the team, then any delivery is always subject to the whims and pressures of someone else’s urgency laden prioritisation queue. We need to fund services for continuous improvement, rather than funding a launch. We need to fund end to end policy management, rather than blindfolded baton passing between different functions or departments. We need structures (and cost centres) that ensure full accountability for an outcome is supported by funding and multi-disciplinary capabilities to deliver the outcome.

Fulcrum 5: Raised expectations

The final fulcrum sounds simple, but is really the most important. Once of the most difficult to shift and self-fulfilling aspects of learned helplessness is when people allow themselves to continually expect the worst. Cynicism creates a form of acceptance and permission for poor behaviour and poor performance to continue, especially in the senior ranks.

When I entered the public sector over a decade ago, I had already seen this pattern from the outside, and I promised to never allow myself to not be surprised at things that make no sense. I ask questions, validate assumptions, look at actual versus intended impact and I encourage people to think about and aim for what will best serve the community, not to just tick the box. When I express surprise at something, people often say to me “but you’ve worked in government a while, surely you’ve seen this before”. I cheerfully tell them I made a conscious choice to not grow numb to systemic issues, often leading to great discussions about to redirect the energy of surprise and frustration into fixing the system, and the dangers of unintentionally propping up bad systems through low expectations.

So a critical but difficult fulcrum for genuine change needs and must be for all public servants to raise our expectations, at all levels. Expect more from yourself, your peers, your bosses, your department, your senior leadership, your Secretary. Don’t praise someone for being kind when that is a basic decency you should expect from everyone. Don’t be satisfied with an executive just listening to your ideas, unless they also give you agency to implement them. Have you noticed that our expectations of people seem to diminish the further up the hierarchy people climb? We should have the highest expectations of our most senior public servants. They should exemplify the very best stewardship, commitment to public good, integrity, culture, responsible administration and equally serving the Government, the Parliament and the People.

Raise your expectations, keep them high, and always, always, expect the best from people. You’d be surprised how many rise to that expectation 😊 You’ll be surprised how powerful a fulcrum it can be.

Over to you

These are five of my favourite fulcrums, what are yours? How have you already applied similar approaches in your own department? What does better public sector administration look like for you? Let’s get some sharing so we can create a better service together, and so that our policy, programme and other levers are more than planks.

Takeaways from FWD50 2022

TL;DR: An overview of my insights from FWD50 2022, including the talk I gave, and the responses to the questions submitted to my talk 🙂 In short, it was awesome! Apologies for the long post!

Every year I attend (or participate in) FWD50, a Canadian conference that I consider the world’s best government transformation event. It is such a special conference because it purposefully doesn’t specialise in just one domain (like the plethora or data, digital, procurement or other events I normally see), but rather it brings together all disciplines around burning questions of the day, and how might the public sector become fundamentally better for the people and communities it serves. FWD50 manages to simultaneously be a social platform for public servants to connect, evolve and be brave together, as well as being something of a petri dish where everyone can participate in co-creating a fundamentally more humane approach to public service. The participants are highly diverse in all respects, with over a hundred government jurisdictions represented from around the world, and thought leadership exhibited from up and down the usual hierarchy chain, embracing the expertise and experience that we all have to share. Some of the most mindblowing sessions often come from junior public servants 🙂

FWD50 is the brainchild of the Croll siblings, Alistair and Rebecca, with a small army of conference experts and public servant volunteers. I can’t recommend this event enough, and the leadership the Crolls have shown, not just in what they’ve built, but in how they continue to deliver it through kind, inclusive, collegial and respectful sharing and provocations. They and their army of awesomeness have also managed to grow and evolve through the pandemic, simultaneously running an in person AND online event, drawing from all the lessons of the last few years, and delivering something both excellent and exemplary for organisations trying to work through their post-COVID existential crisis 🙂

It was also an opportunity for me to connect with colleagues and friends in the Canadian Government, including my old DECD (Digital Experience and Client Data) team at Service Canada. It was SUCH a delight, such a joy, to meet, hug, and hear about how the team are going, including Aaron Jaffrey, who took over leading DECD. I could not have asked for a better person to take care of this very special team, thanks again Aaron! DECD continue to design and deliver amazing things, to be an exemplar for purpose-led, kind and calm culture, and to truly put people at the centre of the design. I miss you all and continue to be your biggest fan 🙂

Below are a few take aways and lessons from the event, shared in the hope they will be helpful, and to encourage more folk to tune in to the discussions and content from FWD50 as a provocation to help plan holistic government transformation in all your own teams 🙂

Key insights

  • I LOVED Alistair’s talk on the second day, where he reminded us that we are using a system of government that is hundreds of years old, and that the next generational shift in “government” is likely in the process of happening, and we won’t even be able to recognise it. He used the Gutenberg Press as an example of how enormous a change we are living through with the Internet, and it was great to go so big and ambitious in thinking, while we set new horizons.
  • Openness and working openly remains the most commonly proposed strategy for building trust, designing and delivering better policy/services, continuous improvement, public engagement, and for genuinely responsible government in the 21st century.
  • Energy is not something you get from someone else. It is something you co-create. I’ve had a few people say my talk energised them, but actually, the energy was a result of us all participating enthusiastically in the topic 🙂 When you think someone else energises you, you are potentially missing the vital role you play in the equation 🙂
  • If we don’t solidify the gains made throughout COVID, then we’ll lose ground, which may in fact lead to losing a large chunk of the workforce who could leave in frustration. People will simply leave if we don’t normalise and support gains like flexible working, greater transparency/openness of work, improved trust and delegation further down the hierarchy, inclusive and geographically diverse hiring, virtual teams, and more streamlined and rapid delivery of services to the general public.
  • Change has never succeeded as a top down strategy. True change requires an approach that invites all staff into the process of designing a meaningful and purpose based future state, identifying how they can each work towards it, and supporting/trusting them to be a part of it. Frontline and SMEs in gov want to see positive change, they just don’t want change for the sake of change, which might in turn negatively impact their clients and the communities they serve.

COVID changed our minds, but not yet our systems

I was surprised by the enormous gap I observed between senior executives and the broader community of public servants, a gap so large it had an almost tangible weight. I’ve always believed change can only happen when you first change your mind. For most public servants, COVID has fundamentally changed our minds. The pandemic irrefutably proved that our systems, structures, processes and ways of working are not capable of responding effectively or humanely to the speed of change/need in the modern world. Sure, we can leverage all kinds of emergency superpowers to push things through in weeks/months instead of years, but we always revert to “normal” after the emergency, and in any case, the more pressure there is, the more insular we become in how we operate. 

We have entered a time of continuous emergencies, and most public servants intuitively know that we need to fundamentally rethink how we do public administration and governance in a mission, purpose and values oriented way. Though many of the talks at FWD50 touched upon the changed world since COVID (check out the agenda here), they seemed to fall into three broad patterns: disruptive reform, building public trust, and what I’ll cheekily call “Hello 2019”. 

We heard incredible stories of disruptive reform in Ukraine, US Veteran Affairs, the importance of a “moonshot” mindset from X, policy transformation, and what “winning” could look like if we be more purpose and outcomes driven. We heard about efforts and models to improve public trust and confidence, to identify and meeting public expectations (beyond a “customer” imperative), how to design for legitimacy, to value and engage employees in a transformation agenda, how to govern AI, and the need to consider the undeniable (but usually overlooked) relationship between the quality of government services and public trust.

But we also heard several “Hello 2019” talks that would have been completely great 3 years ago, but felt just a little out of touch with the heightened expectations and new challenges from almost 3 years of COVID. The talks about “we just need some better platforms”, or “policy should just focus on delivery”, or “it all starts with digital identity”. It’s not to say these aren’t important topics to explore, but it felt almost like there is a new gravity in place, where most public servants and the people we serve want us to urgently focus on the why, not just the what or how. In the grand scheme of things, it is easy to deliver new digital stuff, but public sectors need to create the ways and means for people to thrive in ambiguity, to navigate complexity, to be socially included and supported when things go wrong, and to live well, even through rolling crises. If public institutions can’t deliver values based and meaningful public good, and do so in alignment with public values and expectations, then tech, tools, platforms, design and other mechanisms for “how” will continue to distract us from delivering on our purpose.

I feel like for all the trauma we have experienced over the last few years, COVID has acted as a form of necessary intervention on several fronts:

  1. A personal intervention, as we all reconnected with family and friends, supported each other through loss and fear, realised how much work had taken over our lives.
  2. A work intervention, as we realised how thin and unnecessary so many things are that usually get in the way of delivering great public services and policy outcomes. We empowered people at all levels to work (micromanagers really struggled with remote teams), we worked more transparently, we really focused on the urgent needs in our communities, and we streamlined a lot of bureaucracy as we reached out a discovered we could, in fact, collaborate and deliver together, and focus on real human needs and outcomes.
  3. A human intervention, as we all had a genuinely shared experience with all other people around the world, regardless of where we are from or who we are. This has provided a sense of empathy with each other, something we might choose to maintain, so we can see more what we have in common with each other moving forward.

So when I see talks that basically feel like “Hello 2019”, it feels like either a missed opportunity, or perhaps like the speaker is slightly out of step with the changed environment they occupy, which is a real pity.

I suggest it is imperative that we all work diligently to change the systems we work within to reflect the change we have had in our minds, rather than allowing our minds to be reverted to the old world. This is not something to wait for others to do, or to “hope” for. Just get on with it, and be the change you want to see 🙂 

Structure eats Incentives eats Culture eats Strategy, for breakfast!

This workshop was just excellent, and one of my favourites this year. It was run by the Think Digital and Code for Canada crews with a few public servant volunteers. They invited participants to share barriers, using an expanded version of the old “Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast” idea. Their proposal was that Incentives eat Culture, and Structure eats Incentives, both of which I have certainly observed in my time working in and with public sectors. I thought it was a profound sentiment and one worth considering in any program or project. Often we get caught up with the issues created by fixing behaviours through better culture, or the lack of a “light on the hill” that strategy is supposed to provide, but both can be undermined or perverted by incentives and structure. For example, an efficiency agenda will always incentivise saving money for the sake of saving money, which always kills opportunities to deliver genuine or purpose driven public good, let alone new value to the public. 

Similarly, the current structure of most government departments was adopted during the NPM (New Public Management) years. It created functional segmentation of disciplines, which has led to a structural barrier to being outcomes focused. Basically, your policy people don’t walk to data, don’t talk to tech, don’t talk to program, etc etc. Collaboration is only possible with a hard won and years in the making cost centre, and cross functional engagement happens at the 11th hour (if at all) rather than from the first minute. Structures shape incentives by the function of your team, and this is most obvious when you talk to IT Departments who have been largely asked to just be efficient for the sake of efficiency, creating a huge barrier between those doing, and the policy or mandate outcomes that their department is responsible for. 

This framing was VERY helpful, and I’m thankful to Ryan, Dorothy, Winter and Luke for the wonderful session 🙂

My talk: building for legitimacy in government

My main talk this year focused on how to build trustworthy systems in the special context of government (slides here). I started by talking about why trust is critical for public sectors, and how trust is earned, not asked for. Public trust and confidence in public institutions is a necessary foundation for all that we administer and deliver in their name. Without trust, public sectors and governments everywhere run the risk of losing perceived and then actual legitimacy, leading to instability and chaos. I then talked about the key ingredients for trust: operating in good faith, with integrity, and as expected by the people/person we deal with. Good faith can be demonstrated in the public sector through a systemic and measurable commitment to human-centred and humane outcomes, strong governance. High integrity of gov can be demonstrated by operating in a way that is demonstrably lawful, accurate, high veracity, assured, consistently applied and appealable. Meeting public expectations of gov means reflecting public expectations, values and needs, doing no harm, being transparent and operating within relevant legal, social, moral and jurisdictional limitations of power.

I then used three use cases to apply this approach:

  1. The use of AI in public sectors, specifically the risky and difficult domain of Machine Learning (ML) based Automated Decision Making (ADM) systems. I laid out how although ML/AI can of course be very helpful in mary use cases, when it comes to ML based ADM, we lose both traceability to legal authorities (legislation, regulation, etc and explainability as required under Administrative Law) and we lose consistency of implementation (which conflicts with Rule of Law, as the system starts to get different outputs to common inputs over time as it “learns”). I presented a series of ways to identify and mitigate harm, but basically made the case that ADM systems in government that are subject to Administrative Law should most likely be rules based, not machine learning based.
  2. For government services, I spoke about key epics that a product team might include that would help services comply to the special context of government, such as recording and providing an explanation of service decisions, ways to measure and monitor for human impact (not just fiscal success indicators), ways to draw on representative and diverse knowledge systems in the design and governance of services, and how truly humane services require human centred futures, measures and design.
  3. For trustworthy operating models, public institutions need to establish humane work environments, empowered teams, a safe and high integrity culture, where anyone can speak truth to power, with all staff having the respect, capacity and support to think and act in the best interests of the public, not just working at 100% capacity on the most urgent thing all the time. This requires a systemic shift to servant leadership inside institutions, but also a strategic commitment to participatory governance, where the public can participate in and help ensure truly humane policies and services.

My final thought was we need a few additional tools in our toolbox to realise the vision and value of truly trustworthy and legitimate public services in the 21st century:

  • Clarity on purpose for a policy or service – if you don’t know the intended impact, how do you know it is working as hoped? We shouldn’t build for the sake of building, we need to design and build for a purpose.
  • Legislation/regulation as code – to test against, build upon, model with, explore and to help people engage with their rights & policy development in a more interactive and meaningful way.
  • Algorithmic/models transparency – to raise public confidence, but also to enable independent testing, research and policy proposals, especially from the academic sector and community advocates. 
  • Tiered risk approach (eg the Canadian Algorithmic Impact Assessment + categories of use) – to avoid the one approach to rule them all approach, and to align risk to how AI (and other systems) are used and their impact, rather than just intrinsic generalist risk.
  • Design for proactive explanation – this requires traceability to legislation/regulation (as code) and to case law/exceptions, it requires records keeping for decisions, and better communications to the public.
  • Participatory policy and governance
  • A human impact measurement framework, to complement fiscal measures
  • Real time monitoring & escalation mechanisms, that feed back into continuous service improvement, and critically, continuous policy improvement. Also to escalate patterns of harm that are detected as they emerge.

The questions submitted for my talk are below with answers 🙂

The famous bridge separating Government from the Public Sector in Ottawa, a visual reminder of the importance of an independent (albeit responsive) public sector.
  1. Where is the balance between meeting our expectations within ourselves and the parameters in which we are sometimes required to work? How do effectively manage expectations for the public?

Honestly I have found that being as open as possible helps build trust to best navigate those waters. We should be open about that balance, as much as we can be, and people don’t expect everything they say to be unthinkingly implemented, but they do expect to be heard. So open up channels for regular communication, for relationship building, for trust building, and you’ll get better policy, better services, better governance, and you’ll get more trust to deal with the things you can’t be as open about. Here is a blog post I wrote about balancing the three masters we all serve: the Government of the day, the Parliament, and the People 🙂 

  1. How do you separate trust in the public service, ie Government and politicians?

By being politically neutral and having a voice for the public sector. People will always be wary of politics, but they should be able to trust their public institutions. So have a voice, demonstrate your commitment and stewardship of the best public good, and maintain that healthy separation of politics and public sector. In Canada you have that lovely bridge demonstrating the division of power. Do your part to always do the right thing, not what’s politically expedient. And ensure you talk about the work of your department directly to the public. If you are only communicating through the lens of political speeches or media releases, you will likely have a problem 🙂

  1. Should there be more accountability for companies to level the playing field of trust, since (some) lack of trust comes from governments’ openness, which exposes all its beautiful disfunctions?

I think it is entirely reasonable for governments to ensure how they interact with companies includes requirements of openness and accountability. But it is hard to regulate behaviours in companies, some will be open by default, some won’t. But you can make certain things a requirement of contracts with companies that can at least ensure the ones who you work directly with meet the requirements of good government, good accountability, and meet the public trust test. But as above, the best way the public sector can grow trust is to have a voice of it’s own. People assume the worst of the public sector because a) it’s everyone’s favourite punching bag, and b) it has unmatched power in a society so people should have some distrust. The onus on the public sector to earn trust is higher than on companies, which is as it should be. So earn that trust by being trustworthy, rather than needing to expose the disfunction of others around us 🙂 All organisations have disfunction, and we can all learn from each other, but have confidence in our value to society.

  1. What is the first human impact measure to start with?

Great question! Honestly just starting is good, but if you ask citizens what they think, then whatever you choose will be reflective of their hopes and fears. It doesn’t need to be the best one, just start. If your jurisdiction is struggling with homelessness, make that your first measure. Similarly for employment, or health indicators, or perhaps trust in government? 🙂 This “Trust in Australian Public Services” report provides a good blueprint for baselining and monitoring changes in public trust over time.

  1. How do we build trust with groups who actively seek to see us fail?

    Like whom? If you are talking about nefarious actors or people who want the public sector to fail, then clearly they aren’t operating in good faith, so demonstrate your value and build trust with the people and communities who actually need to trust you 🙂
  2. Can you also talk how the “reputation” of a governing system is impacted by changes in trust?

    When people lose trust in the public sector, everything we administer is at risk of losing perceived legitimacy. It is as serious as that. Trust is critical for public sectors to operate with legitimacy.
  3. How do we shift how executives see AI & try to incorporate tiny improvements to make the backend better?

    Present a vision for what good could look like to get buy in, and then show how all the different ingredients needed make the cake (including the impact if you skip an ingredient!)
  4. You show a sensitivity to indigenous people. How can we use assisted decision making to increase indigenous peoples trust in government?

    Ask them 🙂 Involve them in the design, delivery and oversight of such systems. Isn’t isn’t just about understanding user needs, it is about including different perspectives in the decision making and governance.
  5. How do you feel about ADM responsibility certification initiatives?

    I can’t answer that as a generic question, because each initiative has strengths and weaknesses. I think it is critical that people realise that an ADM system of any kind is still subject to all the other accountabilities and responsibilities we have in gov, so they should be certified against that rather than yet another certificate that a person can tick which may or may not meet the robust requirements of Administrative Law. Most frameworks for AI I’ve seen only suggest, at the heart of it, two things: human in the loop, and consideration of some nice sounding principles. Both these mechanisms can be helpful but are so far from sufficient it is deeply concerning to see them help up as the baseline. The AIA at least provides a risk framework to scale up and down controls based on impact. I believe we need to be able to demonstrate at a minimum, the explainability with traceability to the legal authorities of the public institution for all gov ADM systems, which arguably requires 1) legislation/regulation as code to trace to. But I also think we need 2) human impact measurement and monitoring (to detect and mitigate harm), a 3) clear goal/outcome for all policies with a “test suite” for each that articulates what output should come from what inputs in a variety of scenarios to test against, and 4) a clarity of what type of AI should be used for what types of activities in gov. ML for research, patterns analysis, investigations, etc can be great (if you can tackle the bias in the data issues).
  6. In example 3, what do you mean by strong culture? Can you give an example?

    Culture informs behaviours. If you don’t have a strong culture that values expertise, that prioritises public good, that operates with integrity and independence, etc, then behaviours can sneak in that undermine the legitimacy of the sector. All public servants, no matter their job or level, need to operate with integrity and in the best public interest. When people are encouraged to just do the job and not contribute “above their pay level” then we lose integrity, we lose all the feedback loops that would otherwise support best public outcomes.
  7. What do you do when youre entire organization thinks differently than you when it comes to trust?

    Hmm, hard one! Well, if it was me (and it has been) then I would make the case, show the impact of low trust, propose what good looks like and how high trust supports the mandate and goals of the org, I would take every opportunity to demonstrate what high trust looks like, and if all else fails, I would seek a different public sector employer.
  8. How do separate trust in public servants from the large companies that work for us with a profit motive?

    By being loud and proud public servants 🙂
  9. What are 3 concrete things individual public servants can do to support legitimacy of government services?

    1) Take every opportunities to engage with communities, advocacy orgs and civil society orgs in your work, they don’t have to be formal comms exercises 🙂 2) always ask the hard questions: how will this benefit the public? how will we know if it is creating harm? Use my questions from the talk as epics in yoru product/policy backlog 🙂 and 3) Take just a little time to imagine what good looks like, to connect with others who are similarly values-driven, and to always, in everything you do, try to bring about something better for people. This last one sounds fluffy, but you’d be surprised how much it influences every concrete action, plan, decision etc in your life.
  10. Thinking back on yesterday’s intro, do we think the digital era may eventually usher in a new participatory democracy?

    Yes. I think it already is doing so, and the change in people’s expectations of government is just the start. We didn’t see a global wave of democratic systems of government until there was a critical mass of people expecting to be able to vote for their leaders rather than to just inherit them. Expectations change the world, and people today expect to have some say in how government operates, not just who they elect in the Parliament.
  11. How do you ensure participatory governance is legitimate when all too often we see it play out as superficial and insincere?

    By doing it well 🙂 Every time you create an example of genuine and valuable participatory governance, you will create a new baseline for people to build upon. Just do it.
  12. How do you deal with communities who earned trust but proved to have egregious motives?

    Will definitely need to unpack this one 🙂 Drop me an email or DM!
  13. How do we get public servants to trust that we can deliver when the system/organization works against us?

    By demonstrating success, working as openly as you can, and changing the system wherever you can. The system is changing, whether it wants to or not, and it is only by persistent commitment that we can steer it in the right direction.
  14. What caused us to get to a point where the legitimacy of gov services is so low? How do we avoid this happening again?

    Honestly I’ve been pondering this for a while. I think we all just adopted tech in an unthinking way in the first instance. Lawyers, policy folk, drafters and even executives considered “implementation” to not be their job, and that disengagement led to techies doing our best, with varying degrees of direction and disempowerment (usually operational policy people just throwing “business requirements” over the fence without any accountability as to the accuracy or legitimacy of those requirements). We used technology and technologists as a blunt instrument to simply mechanise the public sector, but now we have to reconnect all the different disciplines to reinstitute an approach to technology where it is an enabler for good government, not just a cost centre or means to save money. We need to move our mechanised sector to a responsive and policy/human-centred approach to how we use and deploy technology, and we need to have technologists at the table with policy, legal, drafters, now joined by design, to work together for the best public sectors that are both human centred, and trust building.
  15. Do you have examples of how NZ has overcome the ‘constant disempowerment’ as you mentioned in your presentation today? What were the steps that made you successful?

    When I worked in NZ we had a small team that was cross agency funded and cross agency governed. I can now look back and realise our success is because we lived in a small gap between the usual constraints of that system. Unfortunately the answer for NZ needs to be a systemic push to delegate more decision making further down. In Australia, significant authority is delegated down 3 levels (beyond the head of department), and sometimes even to 2 more levels beyond that. 5 levels of authority over funding decisions, program planning, team management, etc. In NZ most authority is delegated 1 level down (DCEs, etc) who then may or may not delegate further. If you want to unlock the brilliance and productivity of the NZ PS, delegation of decision making over budgets, staff, operational decision making etc needs to be pushed down at least another 2 levels to get anywhere close to where other comparable public services are at. Otherwise you need to build bubbles in the gaps, which is not sustainable.
  16. Thank you PIA!

    Aww, I’ll take that as a comment not a question, but thank you too!

Sadly leaving the NSW Government

This week was sadly my last week with the NSW Government, Department of Customer Service, formerly the Department of Finance, Services and Innovation. I am sad to be leaving such an exciting place at such an exciting time, but after 12 months of commuting from Canberra to Sydney. The hardest part of working in the NSW Government has been, by far, the commute. I have been leaving my little family every week for 3, 4 or 5 days, and although we have explored possibilities to move, my family and I have to continue living in Canberra for the time being. It has got to the point where my almost 4 year old has asked me to choose her over work, a heart breaking scenario as many will understand. 

I wanted to publicly thank everyone I worked with, particularly my amazing teams who have put their heart, soul and minds to the task of making exceptional public services in an exceptional public sector. I am really proud of the two Branches I had the privilege and delight to lead, and I know whatever comes next, that those 160 or so individuals will continue to do great things wherever they go. 

I remain delighted and amazed at the unique opportunity in NSW Government to lead the way for truly innovative, holistic and user centred approaches to government. The commitment and leadership from William Murphy, Glenn King, Greg Wells, Damon Rees, Emma Hogan, Tim Reardon, Annette O’Callaghan, Michael Coutts-Trotter (and many others across the NSW Government senior executive) genuinely to my mind, has created the best conditions anywhere in Australia (and likely the world!) to make great and positive change in the public service.

I want to take a moment to also directly thank Martin Hoffman, Glenn, Greg, William, Amanda Ianna and all those who have supported me in the roles, as well as everyone from my two Branches over that 12 months for their support, belief and commitment. It has been a genuine privilege and delight to be a part of this exceptional department, and to see the incredible work across our Branches.

I have only been in the NSW Government for 12 months, and in that time was the ED for Digital Government Policy and Innovation for 9 months, and then ED Data, Insights and Transformation for a further 3 months.

In just 9 months, the Digital Government Policy and Innovation team achieved a lot in the NSW Government digital space, including:

  • Australia’s first Policy Lab (bringing agile test driven and user centred design methods into a traditional policy team),
  • the Digital Government Policy Landscape (mapping all digital gov policies for agencies) including IoT & a roadmap for an AI Ethics Framework and AI Strategy,
  • the NSW Government Digital Design Standard and a strong community of practice to contribute and collaborate
  • evolution of the Digital NSW Accelerator (DNA) to include delivery capabilities,
  • the School Online Enrolment system,
  • an operational and cross government Life Journeys Program (and subsequent life journey based navigators),
  • a world leading Rules as Code exemplars and early exploration of developing human and machine readable legislation from scratch(Better Rules),
  • establishment of a digital talent pool for NSW Gov,
  • great improvements to data.nsw and whole of government data policy and the Information Management Framework,
  • capability uplift across the NSW public sector including the Data Champions network and digital champions,
  • a prototype whole of government CX Pipeline,
  • the Innovation NSW team were recognised as one of Apolitical’s 100+ teams teaching government the skills of the future with a range of Innovation NSW projects including several Pitch to Pilot events, Future Economy breakfast series,
  • and the improvements to engagement/support we provided across whole of government.

For the last 3 months I was lucky to lead the newly formed and very exciting Data, Insights and Transformation Branch, which included the Data Analytics Centre, the Behavioural Insights Unit, and a new Transformation function to explore how we could design a modern public service fit for the 21st century. In only 3 months we

  • established a strong team culture, developed a clear cohesive work program, strategic objectives and service offerings,
  • chaired the ethics board for behavioural insights projects, which was a great experience, and
  • were seeing new interest, leads and engagement from agencies who wanted to engage with the Data Analytics Centre, Behavioural Insights Unit or our new Transformation function.

It was wonderful to work with such a fantastic group of people and I learned a lot, including from the incredible leadership team and my boss, William Murphy, who shared the following kind words about my leaving:

As a passionate advocate for digital and transformative approaches to deliver great public services, Pia has also been working steadily to deliver on whole-of-government approaches such as Government as a Platform, service analytics and our newly formed Transformation agenda to reimagine government.

Her unique and effective blend of systems thinking, technical creativity and vision will ensure the next stage in her career will be just as rewarding as her time with Customer Service has been.

Pia has made the difficult decision to leave Customer Service to spend more time with her Canberra-based family.

The great work Pia and her teams have done over the last twelve months has without a doubt set up the NSW digital and customer transformation agenda for success.

I want to thank her for the commitment and drive she has shown in her work with the NSW Government, and wish her well with her future endeavours. I’m confident her focus on building exceptional teams, her vision for NSW digital transformation and the relationships she has built across the sector will continue.

For my part, I’m not sure what will come next, but I’m going to have a holiday first to rest, and probably spend October simply writing down all my big ideas and doing some work on rules as code before I look for the next adventure.

Choose your own adventure – keynote

This is a blog version of the keynote I gave at linux.conf.au 2017. Many thanks to everyone who gave such warm feedback, and I hope it helps spur people to think about systemic change and building the future. The speech can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6IqGuxCKa8.

I genuinely believe we are at a tipping point right now. A very important tipping point where we have at our disposal all the philosophical and technical means to invent whatever world we want, but we’re at risk of reinventing the past with shiny new things. This talk is about trying to make active choices about how we want to live in future and what tools we keep or discard to get there. Passive choices are still a choice, they are choosing the status quo. We spend a lot of our time tinkering around the edges of life as it is, providing symptomatic relief for problems we find, but we need to take a broader systems based view and understand what systemic change we can make to properly address those problems.

We evolved over hundreds of thousands of years using a cooperative competitive social structure that helped us work together to flourish in every habitat, rapidly and increasingly evolve an learn, and establish culture, language, trade and travel. We were constantly building on what came before and we built our tools as we went.

In recent millennia we invented systems of complex differentiated and interdependent skills, leading to increasingly rapid advancements in how we live and organise ourselves physically, politically, economically and socially, especially as we started building huge cities. Lots of people meant a lot of time to specialise, and with more of our basic needs taken care of, we had more time for philosophy and dreaming.

Great progress created great surplus, creating great power, which we generally centralised in our great cities under rulers that weren’t always so great. Of course, great power also created great inequalities so sometimes we burned down those great cities, just to level the playing field. We often took a symptomatic relief approach to bad leaders by replacing them, without fundamentally changing the system.

But in recent centuries we developed the novel idea that all people have inalienable rights and can be individually powerful. This paved the way for a massive culture shift and distribution of power combined with heightened expectations of individuals in playing a role in their own destiny, leading us to the world as we know it today. Inalienable rights paved the way for people thinking differently about their place in the world, the control they had over their lives and how much control they were happy to cede to others. This makes us, individually, the most powerful we have ever beed, which changes the game moving forward.

You see, the internet was both a product and an amplifier of this philosophical transition, and of course it lies at the heart of our community. Technology has, in large part, only sped up the cooperative competitive models of adapting, evolving and flourishing we have always had. But the idea that anyone has a right to life and liberty started a decentralisation of power and introduced the need for legitimate governance based on the consent of citizens (thank you Locke).

Citizens have the powers of publishing, communications, monitoring, property, even enforcement. So in recent decades we have shifted fundamentally from kings in castles to nodes in a network, from scarcity to surplus or reuse models, from closed to open systems, and the rate of human progress only continues to grow towards an asymptoic climb we can’t even imagine.

To help capture this, I thought I’d make a handy change.log on human progress to date.

# Notable changes to homo sapiens – change.log
## [2.1.0] – 1990s CE “technology revolution & internet”
### Changed
– New comms protocol to distribute “rights”. Printing press patch unexpectedly useful for distributing resources. Moved from basic multi-core to clusters of independent processors with exponential growth in power distribution.

## [2.0.0] – 1789 CE “independence movements”
### Added
– Implemented new user permissions called “rights”, early prototype of multi-core processing with distributed power & comms.

## [1.2.0] – 1760 CE “industrial revolution”
### Changed
– Agricultural libraries replaced by industrial libraries, still single core but heaps faster.

## [1.1.1] – 1440 CE “gutenberg”
### Patched
– Printing press a minor patch for more efficient instructions distribution, wonder if it’d be more broadly useful?

## [1.1.0] – 2,000 BCE “cities era”
### Changed
– Switched rural for urban operating environment. Access to more resources but still on single core.

## [1.0.0] – 8,000 BCE “agricultural revolution”
### Added
– New agricultural libraries, likely will create surplus and population explosion. Heaps less resource intensive.

## [0.1.0] – 250,000 BCE “homo sapiens”
### Added
– Created fork from homo erectus, wasn’t confident in project direction though they may still submit contributions…

(For more information about human evolution, see https://www.bighistoryproject.com)

The point to this rapid and highly oversimplified historical introduction is threefold: 1) we are more powerful than ever before, 2) the rate of change is only increasing, and 3) we made all this up, and we can make it up again. It is important to recognise that we made all of this up. Intellectually we all understand this but it matters because we often assume things are how they are, and then limit ourselves to working within the constraints of the status quo. But what we invented, we can change, if we choose.

We can choose our own adventure, or we let others choose on our behalf. And if we unthinkingly implement the thinking, assumptions and outdated paradigms of the past, then we are choosing to reimplement the past.

Although we are more individually and collectively powerful than ever before, how often do you hear “but that’s just how we’ve always done it”, “but that’s not traditional”, or “change is too hard”. We are demonstrably and historically utter masters at change, but life has become so big, so fast, and so interrelated that change has become scary for many people, so you see them satisfied by either ignoring change or making iterative improvements to the status quo. But we can do better. We must do better.

I believe we are at a significant tipping point in history. The world and the very foundations our society were built on have changed, but we are still largely stuck in the past in how we think and plan for the future. If we don’t make some active decisions about how we live, think and act, then we will find ourselves subconsciously reinforcing the status quo at every turn and not in a position to genuinely create a better future for all.

So what could we do?

  • Solve poverty and hunger: distributed property through nanotechnology and 3D printing, universal education and income.
  • Work 2 days a week, automate the rest: work, see “Why the Future is Workless” by Tim Dunlop
  • Embrace and extend our selves: Transhumanism, para olympics, “He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin’s point of view he might have seemed like something less.” — William Gibson, from Johnny Mnemonic. Why are we so conservative about what it means to be human? About our picture of self? Why do we get caught up on what is “natural” when almost nothing we do is natural.
  • Overcome the tyranny of distance: rockets for international travel, interstellar travel, the opportunity to have new systems of organising ourselves
  • Global citizens: Build a mighty global nation where everyone can flourish and have their rights represented beyond the narrow geopolitical nature of states: peer to peer economy, international rights, transparent gov, digital democracy, overcome state boundaries,
  • ?? What else ?? I’m just scratching the surface!

So how can we build a better world? Luckily, the human species has geeks. Geeks, all of us, are special because we are the pioneers of the modern age and we get to build the operating system for all our fellow humans. So it is our job to ensure what we do makes the world a better place.

rOml is going to talk more about future options for open source in the Friday keynote, but I want to explore how we can individually and collectively build for the future, not for the past.

I would suggest, given our role as creators, it is incumbent on us to both ensure we build a great future world that supports all the freedoms we believe in. It means we need to be individually aware of our unconscious bias, what beliefs and assumptions we hold, who benefits from our work, whether diversity is reflected in our life and work, what impact we have on society, what we care about and the future we wish to see.

Collectively we need to be more aware of whether we are contributing to future or past models, whether belief systems are helping or hindering progress, how we treat others and what from the past we want to keep versus what we want to get rid of.

Right now we have a lot going on. On the one hand, we have a lot of opportunities to improve things and the tools and knowledge at our disposal to do so. On the other hand we have locked up so much of our knowledge and tools, traditional institutions are struggling to maintain their authority and control, citizens are understandably frustrated and increasingly taking matters into their own hands, we have greater inequality than ever before, an obsession with work at the cost of living, and we are expected to sacrifice our humanity at the alter of economics

Questions to ask yourself:

Who are/aren’t you building for?
What is the default position in society?
What does being human mean to you?
What do we value in society?
What assumptions and unconscious bias do you have?
How are you helping non-geeks help themselves?
What future do you want to see?

What should be the rights, responsibilities and roles of
citizens, governments, companies, academia?

Finally,we must also help our fellow humans shift from being consumers to creators. We are all only as free as the tools we use, and though geeks will always be able to route around damage, be that technical or social, many of our fellow humans do not have the same freedoms we do.

Fundamental paradigm shifts we need to consider in building the future.

Scarcity → Surplus
Closed → Open
Centralised → Distributed
Analogue → Digital
Belief → Rationalism
Win/lose → Cooperative competitive
Nationalism → Transnationalism
Normative humans → Formative humans

Open source is the best possible modern expression of cooperative competitiveness that also integrates our philosophical shift towards human rights and powerful citizens, so I know it will continue to thrive and win when pitted against closed models, broadly speaking.

But in inventing the future, we need to be so very careful that we don’t simply rebuild the past with new shiny tools. We need to keep one eye always on the future we want to build, on how what we are doing contributes to that future, and to ensuring we have enough self awareness and commitment to ensuring we don’t accidentally embed in our efforts the outdated and oftentimes repressive habits of the past.

To paraphrase Gandhi, build the change you want to see. And build it today.

Thank you, and I hope you will join me in forging a better future.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-08-21

  • YouTube pls? 😉 RT @rob_sheridan: Spider keeps building webs in doorway. He just likes watching my AAAAAIWALKEDTHROUGHASPIDERWEB dance. #
  • African Hunting Dogs are amazing. They have 80% success rate w hunts (lions have 20%) & take food back to young & sick at den. Incredible. #
  • These animals are beautiful! Going to post video of her climbing a very high pole for some meat later today. #dubbozoo http://t.co/zPs2a39 #
  • Wow, for up close & personal w a Sumatra Tiger, photos to come! Loving the wild African dogs, elephants, wombats, so much awesome! #dubbozoo #
  • Fascinating RT @stephenodonnell: Fighting back against dictators shutting down the Internet http://t.co/9EjimWd #
  • You are now officially on my list 😉 MUST READ via @crystalsinger RT Have you seen this yet? http://t.co/sbctNH7 #
  • Went into a pub in Dubbo tonight only to be rickrolled. Srsly uncool Dubbo. The worst was the 12yr old barman not understanding my rage. #
  • Ah Sydney, how I have missed thee 🙂 #
  • Currently listening to Blonde Redhead as recommended by a friend. Pretty cool 🙂 http://t.co/g1LE9Yv #music #
  • Am going to Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo today. So VERY excited! 🙂 Here with a good photographer friend so will post some stuff. #
  • Gorgeous morning in the blue mountains. Am out for a run. Love it! http://t.co/C10y1N2 #
  • Most entertaining reporting of #qt ever RT @CrabbTwitsard: An easy rhyme! His words are music: To my ears, thank God – Ed Husic. #
  • Fascinating RT @maxious bothkindsofpolitics.org unlocked the Citizen Auditor achievement. Though Commonwealth Gazette hardly gov2 😉 #gov2au #
  • Treating myself to lunch today (at the Quince & Almond). Yum! http://t.co/1IXmzsj #
  • A discussion point emerging for #govcampau is the importance of collab across govt. Should be interesting 🙂 #gov2au http://t.co/H582KHn #
  • .@citizen_cam more money is always asked for, but I hope you have lots of other ideas for a 10yr strategic national cultural policy 🙂 #
  • .@jodiem Hmm, I'm optimistic. I see social media adoption in some traditionally highly conservative areas, ppl are starting to understand 🙂 #
  • .@jodiem Yeah, to be fair I think it's a matter of hearing horror stories, not understanding the medium & drawing uninformed conclusions. #
  • .@ibeardslee Heh, nah 🙂 I'm here to help raise all boats, naming and shaming rarely works 😉 #
  • .@jodiem Interestingly facebook/twitter was brought up as examples that "undermine" online mental health initiatives. Curiously out of touch #
  • Current great question from journo about CRC funding & how 'often linked to irrelevant things like patents'. Interesting #npc #mentalhealth #
  • Journo saying we don't tend to have cyberbullying amongst adults. Oh rly? #npc #
  • Listening to ?'s from press about helping young ppl with mental health using the internet. They're v skeptical <grin> http://t.co/k0DWKY4 #
  • RT @grmsn LinuxCon 2011 Keynotes Streamed Free – http://t.co/3KNyqCA #geek #
  • After great feedback & edits, please check out "Without Warning" http://t.co/RBq9M0l It's my fav so far 🙂 #music /cc @mideion @purserj #
  • Heh, that's me! 🙂 But only for the powers of good 😉 RT @kwebb: @piawaugh Mistress of misdirection B-) #
  • Clever but simple. Alacrity use mobile numbers as identifiers for users to create personalised interaction (through browser apps). #gov2au #
  • Alacrity at mobile gov event saying a mobile strategy doesn't just mean iPhone app. Giving useful advice about access/compatability #gov2au #
  • #gov2au RT @lubnaalam: How do we engage multiple users in one single screen ? Nsquared @mgovnicta #
  • Just saw an awesome collaborative app by nsquared for learning electronics for primary school kids. #gov2au #
  • .@jufemaiz add stuff to Wiki anyway and I'll make sure it is discussed. 🙂 there is also a datacamp happening in Brissie 24th Sept #gov2au #
  • Listening to guy from nsquared say that children using tech doesn't create isolation, they naturally work together/collaboratively #gov2au #
  • Gets me every time! </tinytantrum> RT @steve_evil: @piawaugh <insert joke about small stature meaning you're always under the rader here> #
  • RT @doneas: At gov e-cluster 3 x 10 min presentations on mobile government plus discussion #gov2au #
  • #gov2au RT @GovConnections Vivek Kundra, 1st US federal CIO, offers some parting thoughts on public service. #govcon http://t.co/pYNJm3a #
  • I love wearing jeans at a suit event. I feel special, like an undercover agent… below the radar 😉 #
  • Currently in an event about Mobile Government by the eGov Tech Cluster at NICTA. Should be interesting #gov2au #
  • Fascinating RT @nicchristensen Looks like a interesting line up: Australia's 1st national investigative journalism conf http://t.co/nusxlVd #
  • Finding my media & #gov2au lists pretty vital for keeping up to date 🙂 Funny to see followers. Main tweet stream for occasional distraction #
  • Currently reading, considering wrt #gov2au RT @CentrePolicyDev Analysis of 20 yrs opinion research on public service http://t.co/7H3AYdd #
  • .@benpobjie Don't let them push you out, otherwise they win 🙂 We'll have to compare war stories sometime 🙂 #
  • Having an incredible week. Lots of amazing & inspiring people to talk to, hang out with, learn from & occasionally share my own insights 🙂 #
  • .@bxmx Yeah np. I thought msg was just as relevant here 🙂 Many amazing peeps in gov doing awesome work, not always externally obvious :/ #
  • Heh, @Du4 you can't invoke politics and star wars together, then complain about the results 😉 #palpatinewasright #
  • Awww, puppy #Po enjoying some grass. Reminds me I need to see kung fu panda 2 soon 🙂 http://t.co/jDIzpiu #
  • That's it, I'm leaving to eat something not disgusting. Thanks all! @GeordieGuy @paulwallbank @Davidramli @renailemay @j_hutch @ScottRhodie #
  • .@govfresh How could it not be!? 🙂 Hopefully recording and publishing everything will also make it useful beyond the day too #govcampau #
  • .@Reemski Hope you can come, would be great to have a local gov perspective 🙂 /cc @RuthEllison #govcampau #
  • Come on, an enormous Hummer with "No carbon tax" & "our democracy is dead". I do hope @grogsgamut gets a photo #noctrally #noctrly? #
  • The #govcampau registrations are already at 52 & there are only 100 places! So get in & register ppl! #gov2au #opengov http://t.co/b6GKdqW #
  • .@Davidramli There's a place for quality analysis by journos who have unique position to follow info/trends /cc @renailemay @ScottRhodie #
  • FFS RT @joshgnosis RT @mcdonaldmatt Anti same sex marriage rally:"there is no greater evil than same sex marriage & it's a threat to us all" #
  • .@renailemay Hah! 🙂 I think tech reporting in Australia is quite high quality (& largely apolitical). Important to recognise & support 🙂 #
  • Telstra in NZ suggest "breaking monopolies" RT @lukehopewell TelstraClear CEO slams NZ's 3 strikes copyright law (ZDNet) bit.ly/pAgRZl #
  • Everybody in da house! RT @AuSenate @AboutTheHouse Senate dept is taking its first tentative steps on Twitter. Can we get a retweet? #gov2au #
  • .@alexkidman Surely, it can be both! A pointless gadget we buy because we WANTS it, so we make ourselves more productive to rationalise 😉 #
  • Ai knows!!! Is making me sad. RT @GreenJ so much spam this morning. #
  • Congrats! 🙂 RT @GrogsGamut From tmrw writing weekly posts @abcthedrum. Lots of graphs or protest signs. Whichever feels the most Drumish #
  • My band "Clamourous Penguins" are playing Thurs week at the Pot Belly. Hope to see some of you there! 🙂 #music http://t.co/8rU1bG2 #
  • Sometimes I wish I lived in Canberra. Simple but very useful. http://t.co/go4kwlp #gov2au #
  • I'm a little obsessed with this song atm but it is such an amazing remix! So I'm tweeting it again! http://t.co/HUjxnD0 #music #depechemode #
  • HAAA haha! #lols #idonotfollowpplwithmarketsintheirprofiles #longhashtags RT @chrisdubrow hi my name is Mark from Etsi … You discriminator #
  • Love it! You draw me in then make me giggle 🙂 RT damonism I think it's a reasonable heuristic for deciding someone is a nob #
  • .@Weinberg_for_PM Erk, auto-responses usually make me unfollow :/ #
  • .@Jim_Croft Yes, it'll be fun. Techie types talking to techie types. None of this fluffy "managerial" foo 😉 #gov2au #govcampau #opengov #
  • <grin> RT @benrhughes sometimes I'm frustrated I'm not represented by the left or right. Then I look at what they represent & feel better 😉 #
  • Is it bad that I choose to not follow anyone with the word "markets" in their profile (with one or two notable exceptions). #
  • Interesting blog RT @Gov2u Here's our take on #Cameron #039;s attempt to shut Social Media: http://t.co/9TIpa7O #gov2au #opengov #
  • I just RT'd this, but it's fascinating. Obv there are points up for debate 🙂 @infobeautiful Left vs Right concept map http://t.co/azyN2iE #
  • .@Ragertarian I hope so! #govcampau needs @dannolan to have any semblence of credibility! 😉 PS – it would be awesome if you cld come Dan 🙂 #
  • Argh, I've never used Wikispaces before, does anyone know how to make it such that I don't have to approve new members? #govcampau #gov2au #
  • Good piece by @ashermoses RT Censoring mobiles and the net: how the West is clamping down http://t.co/cLaoXLM via @smh #
  • .@stokely Yays! That's right folks, Gov 2.0 here in action 😉 I hope to get to ppl engaging gov at all levels so constructively 🙂 #gov2au #
  • OK #gov2au #gov20 #opengov & #opendata peeps, check it out! Sept 10th #govcampau will ROCK! See you there 🙂 http://t.co/H582KHn #
  • Totally. Life is grey. RT @benrhughes well, people are people. They're multi-faceted. Sometimes awesome, sometimes not. But I still like em. #
  • Briefly saw @latikambourke on the TV this morning, yay you! 🙂 #
  • Need feedback on this song please. It's an early demo, but one of my favourites so far 🙂 "Without Warning" http://t.co/hCfT2ID #music #
  • "Without Warning" – the most difficult song I've yet collaborated with @mideion on. It's a very difficult & tragic s… http://t.co/hCfT2ID #
  • Haaa hahaha! Q: "Can you destroy the earth", The Tick "egads I hope not, that's where I keep all my stuff!" #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-08-14

  • I love garage sales. LOVE them 🙂 http://t.co/DGmAka0 #
  • Is Oct long weekend 1st weekend in October? Is it a long weekend for all? Is Sydney to Adelaide too far for 3 days @moldor @Rog42 @zerohash #
  • Am at Pot Belly to listen to a few bands, including some friends of mine. Always fun to go out and gear some good Aussie music 🙂 #
  • Thanks @Steve_evil for the tour.@CanberraRep is awesome 🙂 Amazing work you've done with an empty old school hall! #
  • Zambrero, my favourite take away place in Canberra (right now) 🙂 Nommy Mexican food! #
  • Perfect Sat = sleep in (after mercy drive to Harden, friend didn't get off train @Yass), theatre, lunch, gym & Pot Belly for live music 🙂 #
  • Just put up another remix of "Not Sure" with better drums by @mideion mixed in. Forgot to put it up earlier 🙂 http://t.co/7C9en8Y #
  • Yay! RT @KateLundy: Getting there….. http://t.co/uHjVKNj on games classification! #r18 #
  • Got another song to release tonight (hopefully!). This is the hardest one I've yet had to write or record. Tells a tragic story :/ #
  • .@jclacherty Heh, I'm sure I'll get to that, just started from the start 🙂 "Gravity, she's a harsh mistress" 😀 #
  • Have just discovered The Tick, one of the funniest things ever. So much lols! #
  • Just got hold of the first Game of Thrones book, I may not sleep tonight 🙂 #
  • Going to see "Life X 3" at the theatre tomorrow. Looks great! Who else is going? http://t.co/IYSTIqM /cc @CanberraRep @steve_evil #
  • RT @ideahive: RT @Mushin: Interesting if you're into collective (un)consciousness & self-organising groups & systems. http://t.co/gn53AaL #
  • Hah! RT @crystalsinger: lol. Outlook is all like, "DO NOT WANT MOAR EMAILZ!", you're just bein' mean to make it work. I'd bluescreen too 😉 #
  • Have to RT to #gov2au 🙂 @dnwallace: Clever Govt. engagement http://t.co/FHF8fOo @myen #gov2 @census2011 #
  • So much awesome! RT @dnwallace: Clever Govt. engagement http://t.co/FHF8fOo @myen #gov2 @census2011 #
  • OK, who of my awesome tweep or #fb friends are going to PyCon & live in Sydney? I know someone in need of couch to surf on for two nights 🙂 #
  • "My teeth snapped like trees" and now I feel ill. There are good reasons to never ask a wordsmith about a painful accident.#squeamish #
  • My work computer occasionally bluescreens when plugging Ethernet in. Troubleshooting it looks related to Outlook being open. Ridiculous #gar #
  • Wow RT @KateKendall: Must-read piece on UK riots by @rustyrockets: 'Big Brother isn’t watching you' – http://t.co/sMCmhZj HT @whatjanesays #
  • Watching the watchers? RT @russellbuckley: Fascinating pic: Police apprehend suspect, surrounded by spectators' mobiles http://t.co/uYSRije #
  • Great presentation about AR-UX: The generation of the pervasive User by @alexmyoung http://t.co/bem0A3U #tech #AR #geek 🙂 #
  • Awesome to catch up, and too rare! RT @trib: Back from very pleasant lunch with my friend @piawaugh #
  • .@mstremeski I never said he didn't use other swords, but he did beat many enemies armed only with wooden swords. Read book of five rings 😛 #
  • Yes show is annoying & Katie's assertions offensive, but some ppl *have* wanted to get involved & represent 🙂 /cc @aimee_maree @katsbud #
  • I largely concur @aimee_maree, esp wrt "some can be highly intelligent" <vomit> but @katsbud didn't do wrong thing… http://t.co/SggaZ9l #
  • Interesting RT @wwjimd: #Tunisia A Digitally-Driven, Leaderless Revolution http://t.co/BSsnvmp #
  • Musashi used a wooden sword, and he never lost #delayedawesomeanswers RT @tribalscientist: Oh, SCA? Not using metal weapons, then? #
  • Heh, totally 🙂 /cc @crystalsinger: @piawaugh Frakkin' bots! :-/ #
  • Totally! RT @daniels_den: @piawaugh What a BSG 'Frak' #fail by the bot. Shame the Firefly 'Goram' isn't more popular. #
  • And now to sleep, perchance to dream 🙂 Night world! #
  • And #bsg FAIL. I demand this bot be educamated! RT @_spell: @piawaugh 'Frak' could be Freak, Frank, Frag, Frau, Fray, Fran, Flak or Frat. #
  • Testing the relative 1337ness of a spelling bot. Frak (sp?) #
  • Wow! Tonight learnt some medieval swordcraft from a master. Had assumed a strength thing, but fascinating power generation + strategy 😀 #fb #
  • Enjoying remix of our song "Everything Dies". Diva (Featuring @Mideion) by Mario Gonzalez via #soundcloud http://t.co/MxtPmuU #music #
  • RT @dizzydeep: Social media case study by Brisbane City Council #localgov SM use in emergency http://t.co/QH5NdrS... http://t.co/TQmTeMg #
  • RT @tag_egov RT @digiphile: If open government is to be citizen-centric, it needs to be search-centric. http://fb... http://t.co/K22XqIc #
  • .@wombat1974 When people bring up that argument (& they do) I say we're creating more effective, efficient & engaging gov 😛 /cc @merejames #
  • .@merejames I think emergence of public servants engaging online (partic within their jobs) as doing that /cc @silkcharm @becsmog @dnwallace #
  • Ever listen to a song and you find your whole self responds to it? I love musical immersion 🙂 So many amazing musicians out there! #fb #
  • Interesting! Crikey series on "Quality Journalism" (by journalists so pinch of salt required <grin>) http://t.co/yLwFedJ /via @crikey_news #
  • Interesting article RT @theriverfed There is a context to #LondonRiots that can't be ignored @guardian http://t.co/mcNE1Ub #
  • A happy puppy is a clean puppy 🙂 #Po http://t.co/ux5nT29 #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-08-07

  • Today's awesomeness brought to me by the Cure, NIN, soundcloud, @mideion, Tea Party, Pixies, the Matrix soundtrack and the letter A 🙂 #
  • Spent the morning cleaning, now going to spend the afternoon playing (games, music, with puppy). Hooray for sunny weekend days! #
  • For the amusement of @Suni1i 🙂 http://t.co/tnzrwp7 #
  • Went into the store to get a clothes hamper. Came out with a kid sized wheelie bin because it was so cute. I'm just a big kid anyway 🙂 #
  • Haaa hahaha 🙂 RT @swearyanthony: @piawaugh freedom is the same as shiny, right? #
  • One of my favourite things about @soundcloud is finding incredible some remixes of songs I love. http://t.co/W7yYzmg #depechemode #music #
  • This is cool, thanks @crikey_news Walk the world in one minute: http://t.co/pjMApBA #
  • Haha! 🙂 RT @steve_evil: @purserj @piawaugh everyone know that it's been plaits or nothing since the 4th dynasty #
  • I like your logic AJ 🙂 RT @ajtowns: @piawaugh war is just the way people with pigtails respond to not being taken seriously #
  • .@wireghoul ah, shall modify my hair then, ta muchly 😉 #
  • Why do ppl take you less seriously with pigtails? Don't they realise it is *the* hairstyle of choice for war? #makingstuffup #
  • Is it sad I'm actually considering buying this book? #ac2 http://t.co/iw4amVF #
  • Heh, Nero, Nemo, whatever! 🙂 #bookswithonelettermissing #
  • Neromancer – the heartwarming story of a cyber cowboy junkie who goes looking for a fish #bookswithonelettermissing #
  • LOL!! RT @crazyjane13: 'Necklace of terror'? REALLY, Today Tonight? #
  • Governor Alex Chernov says what better place to host #iawards than Melbourne, the tech capital of Australia. I feel healthy debate coming 🙂 #
  • Phew, got them all I think 🙂 #iawards #
  • #iawards for ICT educator of the year was Jo Stewart-Rattray (SA) #
  • #iawards for secondary school project goes to Villanova College for their Physics Engine (QLD) #
  • #iawards for security goes to Pure Hacking for PureWAF managed web app firewall service (NSW) #
  • #iawards for tourism and hospitality goes to Centium Software for GuestPoint (QLD) #
  • #iawards correction to sustainability & green it award actually goes to CSIRO Tasmanian ICT Centre for South ESL Hydrological Sensor #sorry #
  • #iawards for tools and infrastructure award goes to Transmax for STREAMS intelligent transport system (QLD) #
  • #iawards for R&D goes to Alacrity Technologies for closes loop environment for wireless (ACT) #
  • #iawards for sustainability & green IT goes to CSIRO ICT centre for Phenonet (ACT) #
  • #iawards for start up company goes to Trueoaks for 99dresses #
  • #iAwards for industrial application goes to Blast Movement Technologies (QLD) for Blast Movement Monitors #
  • #iAwards for financial industry application award goes to Suncorp & Thoughtworks (NSW) with merit to Auditflow Publishing #
  • #iAwards Export Achievement goes to CargoWise GLOW (NSW) #
  • #iawards for eLogistics and Supply Chain goes to SolveIT Software supply chain network optimiser #
  • #iawards for eLearning goes to Janison (NSW) cloud assessment with merit award for the Australian ehealth research centre #
  • #iawards for eInclusion & eCommumity goes to InfoExchange Australia (VIC) #
  • #iawards for eHealth went to the Australian ehealth research centre with merit to Edge Box #
  • #iAwards egovernment award went to Transmax, STREAMS motorway mgkt (qld) #
  • #iAwards Huawei Australia won the first award for communications #
  • Hah 🙂 RT @carolduncan: .@2011Census What about people who are, um, having a 'sleepover' at home of someone they shouldn't oughta be at??? #
  • Interesting RT @google: New: When patents attack Android. http://t.co/qZdipn6 #
  • Woot! In ur tweets, bringing da awesums RT @2011Census: #AusCensus data reveals 98 per cent of @2011Census Twitter followers are awesome. #
  • Ian Birks (AIIA): Australia has leaders across the spectrum of technology innovation and business & the #iAwards recognise & celebrate this #
  • I love it how "live streaming" is so loosely interpreted these days… #
  • The 2011 iAwards are about to start, be interesting to see different category winners 🙂 #iAwards It's being recorded & put online later #
  • Currently looking at work for the Australia Centre for Broadband Innovation http://t.co/i785MH3 #iAwards #
  • .@normnz That comment was specific to context of R&D where collab nonexistent. Of course more commercial collab would be good 🙂 #iAwards #
  • .@sadieandlance NP 🙂 The recommendations being made are *very* interesting but they'll be online later I'm told. Will tweet later. #iAwards #
  • I've heard synergy and synergise several times in the last hour. Must. Stop. Brain. Exploding… #
  • John Grant: single biggest thing going wrong (with IT industry) is capability to collaborate. Let's get serious about it & fix it. #iAwards #
  • Jane Treadwell (eGovernment, ICT & Transformation, World Bank) currently discussing IT procurement & diff between BAU & innovation #iAwards #
  • Jane Treadwell saying how Cloud services & online App stores provide means for small innovative companies to get into gov market #iAwards #
  • John Grant, Chair of the IT Industry Innovation Council talking about innovation & the issue when only underpinned by fiscal policy #iAwards #
  • Dr Robertson: 3 skillsets needed for commercialisation: Research, Engineering & the skills to translate innovation to market use #iAwards #
  • OK Labs getting a shout out from Dr Phil Robertson at #iAwards as great developers of innovation (with Open Source) that have succeeded OS #
  • Dr Phil Robertson saying patents aren't everything, but are critical. #iAwards <- I feel patents are massively overrated wrt tech innovation #
  • Dr Phil Robertson (NICTA) Academics are rewarded on publications not implementation, diff skillset & needs consideration #iAwards #
  • Prof Reg Coutts: every time someone digs up some uranium or something everyone relaxes & goes back to old models. Need new models. #iAwards #
  • Prof Reg Coutts says in Australia ppl rarely want to hear about small innovative companies. Unis & NICTA could work better together #iAwards #
  • Interesting to hear about background of Australia Hears. Dr Saunders talking about diff between gov procurement vs investment. #iawards #
  • Speech at #iAwards panel on Australian innovation strengths (eg well educated, ease of biz setup) & weaknesses (eg collab, r&d funding). #
  • Currently rocking my morning http://t.co/FQZrXDj #music #industrialdub #ting @soundcloud #
  • Nice RT @donkey: A winters day motorcycle commute can be such a drag (/cc @piawaugh) #manawatu http://t.co/zThpCFt #
  • Heh, awesome RT @VancianNotions: lord of the rigs – a conman's truck drivers epic journey. #bookswithonelettermissing #
  • .@kattekrab Poop :/ I need some other excellent friend in Melbourne to stay with. HAve a lovely trip and catch up when you're back 🙂 #
  • I *LOVE* @soundcloud! Just had someone remix a song I've collaborated on http://t.co/DwH6yJZ Original at http://t.co/xbbGsdA #music <3 #
  • I don't know why ppl make a huge fuss over riding a motorbike in winter. It's extra work keeping hands warm & avoiding ice, but wonderful! #
  • Interesting RT @pgsimoes: Matt Damon Explains Why The Perception of Teachers Must Change [VIDEO] http://t.co/P2pIyod (@edudemic) #
  • RTing to #gov2au & #fb 🙂 HILARIOUS! RT @IDEALAW: Facebook will destroy your children's brains [or…not.] http://t.co/nW2PMo7 #
  • HILARIOUS! RT @IDEALAW: Facebook will destroy your children's brains [or…not.] http://t.co/nW2PMo7 /cc @tribalscientist #
  • Enjoying a drink at the phoenix in civic. A new fav handout methinks 🙂 #
  • Attended funeral service for Rob Chalmers. Lovely service with great stories from his life. 60yrs in Aus Press Gallery. Proud to be related. #
  • Am attending the iAwards in Melbourne on Thurs with @katelundy (AIIA, ACS & Pearcey awards event). Should be fun 🙂 http://t.co/4ZbFsmj #
  • Currently reading insightful speech by Terry Moran AO http://t.co/vKtSjhs "Democracy and us" #gov2au #opengov #gov20 /via @ozloop #
  • .@aimee_maree Yeah, I'm the same 🙂 Hey @2011Census, any chance of the ability to have multiple ancestry options per parent? 🙂 #
  • This is brilliant. Beautiful graphics, funny, insightful, informative. Love it! Nice work http://t.co/UTWXvWd @2011Census #gov2au #gov20 #
  • Yes! Totally! Where and when? Evening right? I have some super cool stuff to show you 🙂 Might be fun to have an informal group once a week? #
  • Playtimes are fun. For @br3nda @jdub #puppy http://t.co/XyOHsyu #
  • Po is very glad to be home. He had his first stay in a kennel whilst I was away 🙂 /cc @Br3nda @jdub #sookydogs http://t.co/Gpxqdnh #
  • Sunny all week this week in Canberra, I'm going to ride Bumblebee (my motorbike) to work a bit I think 🙂 #woot #
  • .@SMinney It's still a good solution but not for problem of getting around (more so for the problem of others' entertainment) /cc @elerimai #
  • .@i386 ARGHLSGLSADKLKEOI!~!! </endshorttantrum> 😉 /cc @purserj #
  • .@RealNickHodge Wow, I'm not even angry, I'm impressed! 😉 /cc @swearyanthony #
  • Hah! You really captured it there. RT @wombat1974 "you raise a very interesting point, fuckknuckle. Please expound on it, dipshit." #
  • Wow, I love it when people abuse you, and then say "nah, I *do* wanna have a conversation". The lack of self awareness is incredible. #
  • Currently looking at winners of MyRegion photo competition. Some incredible photos from all around Australia! http://t.co/07lGykA #pretty #
  • .@jzb Hah! That would totally rock, but I fear I have not yet earnt such a privilege. Watch this space 😉 /cc @garethgreenaway #
  • Back at work, wading thru mountains of email, news, events, briefs. Perhaps should caffeinate seeing I've been up since 0400 (flew from Tas) #
  • I'm going to NICTA eGov event on mobile government on 17th Aug, thought some #gov2au peeps might be interested 🙂 http://t.co/437aQh0 #gov20 #
  • Free wireless, coffee, headphones+awesome music, new msgs from friends: these are a few of my fav things (waiting for plane at Melb airport) #
  • Back online & back to work this morning. Had amazing week in Tasmania, another step closer to starting a martial arts school in Canberra 😀 #
  • Yesterday I saw someone I hadn't seen for 15 yrs who told me I looked exactly the same. Looks like the alchemy lessons paid off 😉 #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-07-31

  • More Launceston. Very pretty. Back at work on Monday. http://t.co/po6IxBF #
  • Hanging out in beautiful Launceston. http://t.co/hs7Y7kL #
  • For the martial arts peeps, check out my Shi Fu's 18 Hands of Lohan http://t.co/xDcEKIt & Linked Rings Boxing http://t.co/6HFQEww #kungfu #
  • Note to all friends with little girls, check out "The Fairies", Aussie kids franchise. Opening in Canberra tmrw 🙂 http://t.co/umZhnKb #
  • Thank you to @NathanFillion for his noble quest to #endswampass http://t.co/pCRUrVE #geek #gamer #
  • Rob Chalmers, veteran journalist died yesterday. An inspiring passionate man who served the press gallery for 60 yrs http://t.co/uTIoEm1 #fb #
  • Thanks all. :`/ Sad when you lose someone awesome, esp when you could have spent more time with them. @ashulz @camcgr @davidramli #
  • Just got some awful news :/ Not having phone access meant finding out badly. We should take opps when we get them & not wait until too late. #
  • Rob Chalmers is incredible. 60 yrs in the press gallery – a treasure of knowledge http://t.co/zKk8VuT He's my cousin, I hope he recovers :/ #
  • Just watched first episode of My Little Pony cartoon on recommendation & it is hilarious 🙂 I'm on holidays! 😛 #
  • K, bedtime now. #
  • One of the things I love about Youtube is quickly finding & listening to music. Currently listening to http://t.co/ATO0Sti #depechemode #fb #
  • Sorry, just one more. Massive Attack, Depeche Mode and John Carpenter. Lovely remix on #soundcloud http://t.co/VUmg3hX #music #fb #cantsleep #
  • Just found a beautiful remix of Depeche Mode, Florence and the Machine & Imogen Heap on #soundcloud http://t.co/HFGhTMQ Enjoy 🙂 #music #fb #
  • Wow, bbpress (forum plugin) is really quite nice. Yay for WordPress integration & in this case s2members integration (Kung Fu school). #
  • Currently listening to NIN remixes and doing some website work. I love holidays 🙂 You can do whatever you like! See http://t.co/qhepCbK 🙂 #
  • I shall work on it, I'm here another 4 days, should be enough 😉 @trib @DavidBromage #
  • .@trib Hah, @davidbromage just beat you to the same joke! 🙂 #
  • Have been visiting horses today, reading Kung Fu texts, entertaining a 4 yr old, training and cooking. Feeling awesome. #perfectday #
  • Just had a friend's 4 year old girl quote CJ from West Wing to me. So much teh awesome! 🙂 #
  • This is ridiculous and hilarious! "We're from Tassie… Our bogans will stab you" http://t.co/VwlG9zv #newyork #
  • Just was told about Lounge Against The Machine. Too funny 🙂 http://t.co/p0AGSZf #music #
  • In Tasmania having an amazing time training and hanging with my Kung Fu Master & his family, but stuck with 0 (yes, 0!) mobile coverage. #fb #
  • Heading down to Launceston (Tas) for a week to train with my kung fu master. Should be fun 🙂 Esp given my snow boarding bruises <grin> #
  • Trying so hard to not feed the trolls, but cannot believe the audacity of ppl trying to capitalise on #Oslo tragedy to spread hate speech. #
  • Awful title but interesting post, esp for those who question value of pseudonyms RT @bug_girl: Why Google+ hates women http://t.co/YUsjpRu #
  • Interesting RT @TonySearl: Why we should abolish the university exam http://t.co/bGyDNve via @ConversationEDU #
  • Wow, awesome! RT @avancampen: So. Cool. RT @MFBorman: Very cool in-car augmented reality! » http://t.co/gM1BFVC #
  • You need more buffer 😉 RT @jethrocarr: dd if=/dev/flat/heater of=/dev/jethro/body <— even with bs=20M, I'm still not getting warm 🙁 #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-07-24

  • Anyone in or willing to travel to Melbourne keen to go the the sequel to the Phantom of the Opera (27 Aug)? 🙂 http://t.co/iN7k4TB #tragic #
  • Having either a big birthday bash (Oct) or 5th Nov party. In either case it'd be a masked ball in a theatre. Who's in? 🙂 #fb Deets to come! #
  • After several years of owning them, I've finally put up some paintings by my awesome friend Sue 🙂 #fb #homemaking http://t.co/HsG8CGy #
  • "Breathe" remix, now with additional rock added. Would love feedback please! 🙂 #soundcloud http://t.co/yYGSxWZ #music #
  • Stuch saying Aus having fossil fuels industry boom conflicts with reducing carbon footprint. He's confusing exports w consumption. #insiders #
  • It's interesting how there is a lot of talk about privacy, but the T&Cs of online tools is hardly considered until things go wrong #insiders #
  • Joining a Google+ "hangout" for #insiders Currently waiting and having to install plugin… See how it goes. #
  • MWAH HAHA. My fav is "Caution, THIS IS SPARTA!" Cross posting from Google+ due to no integration 😉 http://t.co/B39JJCI /via @loquacities #
  • I live my new t-shirt, thanks @katsbud 🙂 I won it at a #girlgeekdinner ages ago. Have to go again now 🙂 /cc @sundress http://t.co/Y9BywW4 #
  • And I could use practise 😉 RT @swearyanthony: @Bondles careful. If you mock @piawaugh she turns into the cutest little killer ninja ever. #
  • Relaxing in a hot hot bath after 2 days boarding at perisher. Awesome. Going again asap 🙂 #
  • Had a wonderful weekend boarding. Today took a very fast blue run and nailed it! Squealed all the way down 🙂 #
  • So much the awesome RT @ConwayH: Oh yes @piawaugh @louisevmorris http://t.co/W8dp1l3 #
  • Hanging at the snow with @sundress today 🙂 had an awesome time. http://t.co/uao8SF0 #
  • Girl geeks go to the snow 🙂 /cc @sundress @katsbud http://t.co/WIN5xsj #
  • I am amused. #angrybirds @ toys r us http://t.co/GWJb7Jg #
  • Stunning subset in yass 🙂 http://t.co/Ds7lblW #
  • Due to some pikers I have a spare 2 free places in a cabin at Perisher this Friday night. Anyone want to come skiing/boarding? 🙂 DM me. #
  • Sucker Punch: wow! Incredible movie. Visually stunning, amazing action, dark, disturbing. Highly recommend. Incredible music too. #
  • Just saw some boys practising Parkour in Yass. Awesome. I need to get training 🙂 #
  • Saw Bridesmaids last night, excellent movie 🙂 particularly awesome to see the cute guy from IT crowd in a good role 🙂 #
  • Yest I went on a horse ride in Canberra. Turns out ACT has some weird legislation about not going above a trot on public horse rides. Argh! #
  • Heh, cool RT @brainpicker So you know, every sci-fi ship to scale http://t.co/lxUklli /VIA @abigailbelfrage #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-07-17

  • .@camcgr Totally :/ But on the flip side, I got to stay in my warm cocoon of a bed 🙂 Always a silver lining I say 😉 #
  • Ooh, a project to create open real-time collaborative video suite. 13 days left for pledges. Check it out http://t.co/WRPR7Su /via @iluciv #
  • .@allanonau Heh, sure 🙂 I'm just having a moment of total respect for all you parents 😉 #
  • Just had friends stay for a few nights. 3 kids can really generate a lot of washing up!!! #
  • Watching series 2 of Beached Az (thx YouTube), my fav one so far is the clams. Oy, gimme a beat. http://t.co/07hixPi #
  • Awesome. RT @sebsharp: Carpe DM #twittersayings #
  • Cool RT @neerav: Reading: about origins of the quote from #spiderman "With great power comes great responsibility." http://t.co/SXEl07y #
  • There is a new cool robot at questacon. Interesting discovery: when robot eyes turn red, you instinctively step back and assume danger 🙂 #
  • Having an awesome 24 hours, catching with lots of awesome ppl 🙂 #
  • Woke up at 5, unable to get back to sleep. Why?!? #grumble Going to try to continue with my blog on online culture over the weekend 🙂 #
  • .@fayezgase no problem 🙂 Our welding with the internet dies remind me of this tho http://t.co/hxBkoca 😉 #
  • Interesting article, amazing how our minds adapt to new tools & opps: search engines replace memory http://t.co/sf5mnkK #
  • .@maxious It's worth remembering gov is always a work in progress. Current status /= fait accompli /cc @sherro58 @alankerlin @craigthomler #
  • .@sherro58 fair point but I think there's diff between bashing & raising concerns. Obv there's ses leaders too /cc @alankerlin @craigthomler #
  • Want! Where did you get it? 🙂 RT @haikugirlOz: Kisses from my nephew after he received his angry birds Tshirt #awesome #
  • <blush> Thx! 🙂 RT @gavintapp: Great discussion happening at #gov2au lunch on online trust and reputation. @piawaugh is smart lady. #
  • Margaret: diff media for diff demographics. For example, young ppl (under 22) aren't on Twitter. #gov2au I think this needs community devel #
  • Margaret talking about AR, gamification, mobile devices, social media, geo location, the cluetrain manifesto. #gov2au #
  • Margaret: young ppl are not limited by our perceptions of what the web is. Australia us streets ahead of the UK with this stuff. #gov2au #
  • Margaret (Reading Room): we are at a fundamental tipping point, social media. I think she's saying the mainstreaming of social media #gov2au #
  • Hah!! Today is Embrace Your Geekiness Day. I've got #gov2au lunch, #BSG Python & gaming planned. Et tu? 🙂 http://t.co/mEmz1N4 #fb #EYGD #
  • Haha, scrabble slogan: "it's your word against ours!" #
  • I'm an aunty!!! I can feel the weight of responsibility already 😉 Congrats to Touie & Chrissie with their baby girl, born last night. #fb #