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"How great are the potential advantages of allowing the public greater freedom of use … relative to the potential harm associated with an increase in misquotations as a result of copyright licensing changes." Nice post by Liam about responses to Digital Economy submissions on copyright.
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Very interesting read, great work by Colin Jackson (misprinted as Colin Jacobs) in the article. That is all I'm going to say 🙂 True colours…
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"This Article argues that we need a politics, or perhaps a political economy, of intellectual property." Interesting concepts, and great references!
Month: May 2009
An amazing day involving metadata, wikis and copyright freedom!
Today was brilliant! The most fun day in my new job working for Senator Lundy! I have been a little lax in my blogging due to being so busy so I thought I’d share a (probably not typical) day in the life of a geek policy advisor 🙂
- Went with Kate to the “Sharing Data, Sharing Ideas” metadata conference for a couple of hours, where the people opening it spoke about the importance of metadata, and openness. I’ve been told all talk slides will be on that website after the conference and Kate will post her speech on her website probably tomorrow.
- Posted the draft briefing paper from the first Public Sphere topic on high speed bandwidth on the new wiki, and within 30 mins had the first contribution! I believe this is the first use of a wiki for public engagement by an Australian Parliamentarian, very exciting stuff!
- Met with some interesting folk to talk about virtual environments, discussed importance of open APIs and standards, and am considering eventually doing a Public Sphere in a fully virtual environment (easily months down the track!).
- Coordinated some material to go into the vodcasts we are doing, and helped another staffer at Kate’s office to look at how to use the website to garner online feedback on an important topic. She’ll likely be also engaging the Facebook community on the topic and it was very satisfying to have the staffer exclaim surprise and happiness that they could directly engage on the website with these newfangled tools 🙂
- Dropped down to the “Copyright Commons; Copyright Freedom” conference which featured amazing international speakers such as Lawrence Lessig (US) and Prodromos Tsiavos (UK, wrote a great paper called Cultivating Creative Commons: From Creative Regulation to Regulatory Commons), and awesome copyright guru Aussies such as David Vaile, Brian Fitzgerald, Prof Graham Greenleaf, Anne Fitzgerald and Jessica Coates. Recorded an amazing audio interview between Kate and Larry Lessig, which we’ll podcast tomorrow, but I was particularly pleased with their responses to “what is the link between copyright freedom and open government”. They mostly just chatted and shared ideas, which makes it pretty cool listening (I think anyway 🙂 ). Kate gave a fantastic speech which she’ll also post tomorrow. Larry recognised me from a conference I met him at many years ago in Brazil, which was impressive (as he was totally jet lagged that day).
- As part of going to the copyright conference, had my first visit to Old Parliament House, a beautiful building and definitely worth visiting.
- Was invited to speak at an eclectic event for geeks to share fringe geek interests and talks, and I’ll likely talk on “being a geek in Parliament House”. Will post more information once I have it.
- Was chatting to Liam Wyatt from Wikimedia Australia about the upcoming GLAM-WIKI seminar (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia). The idea is “a two-way dialogue to determine how to use the two communities’ strengths to a mutual advantage”, should be really interesting!
So although it has been a 15 hour day (who says public servants don’t do long hours!) it has been amazing. I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of this “policy advisor” thing, and one of my main initial goals of being a conduit to the community and industry is working out nicely with the public spheres and some other projects we are working on 🙂
As David Vaile so eloquently put today, I’m as happy as a pig in mud, and energised enough to be up and blogging at 4am, time to go sleep…
links for 2009-05-25
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Really interesting presentation given by Stephen Collins in NZ at the GOVIS conference. Great references to Gov 2.0 stuff happening in US, NZ and Australia.
Bonfire preparations
I’m not blogging as much as usual, and will try to get back onto regular posts but have been so busy! Have some great posts coming about life and work in Parliament House 🙂
Today was out at the “farm” (the cute name for the 170 acres of untouched Australian bush that belongs to my parents). Anyway, some lovely photos are below. Po had a great time and was very tired by the end of the day, even though he wasn’t the one making bonfires!
High speed broadband in Australia – what do you think?
I decided that every time I’m doing something in my work for Senator Kate Lundy that I think is of interest to the FOSS community, my family, and many other readers of this blog, I’ll repost it here 🙂 I’ll tag any such posts with “katelundy” to make it easier to pick them.
So the most recent project (which I’m really excited about!) is the launch of a new initiative called “Public Spheres”. The idea is based on the definition of a Public Sphere as a space that:
“…through the vehicle of public opinion it puts the state in touch with the needs of society” [1]
Our goal is to effectively create an accessible and effective way to collate perspectives, opportunities, concerns and other feedback on topical issues of the day, and we are copying the process that was used at the recent AdTech conference. Basically you stream talks and have all feedback, questions and such happening online. This way both local and remote participants in the event can engage fully in the process.
Anyway, our first topic is around the opportunities and impact of high speed bandwidth in Australia, and already we’ve had proposed talks around Green ICT, media, delivery of government services, telecommuting, agricultural and environmental information, emergency services and more! So if you have something you’d like to talk about, check out on the website whether someone else is already covering your topic, and volunteer yourself for a 10 minute speech for the day. You can either present it in person, or pre-record it for the event.
Full details are at http://www.katelundy.com.au/category/publicsphere/
[1] Habermas, Jürgen (German(1962 – English Translation 1989), p 31. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Categoryof Bourgeois Society. Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press. p. 30. ISBN 0-262-58108-6. UPDATE: The conference that used Twitter that was mentioned to me was AdTech, not ATUG as originally posted, apologies for the confusion!