GovHack 2019 Launched

Greetings from the Canberra launch of GovHack 2019. This is the tenth year of the GovHack completion where teams have a few days to build an application using open government data. This is hosted by the Australian National University for 2019. It happens  have just come from the launch of the Square One co-working space at ANU, next door.

Are we opening up Australian Government?

Greetings from a law-book lined library at the Australian National University, where Daniel Stewart, Senior Lecturer, ANU College of Law is asking "Are we opening up government?". This is in his role as part of the evaluation of the Australian Open Government National Action Plan 2016-18. This is a bit like being an extra in an episode of the ABC TV comedy "Utopia", with a "dashboard" showing cute green icons, which claims everything is on track.

Leaving the cynicism aside, and the difficulty of a credible plan for open government in the current political climate, the plan has some good intentions. As an example 2.3 "Digitally transform the delivery of government services" is a good idea. This is delegated to the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA), which makes sense. The DTA was to to deliver a roadmap, which they seem to have done. However, what is lacking are the trained staff needed to implement the roadmap.

Australian Open Government Consultations

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet is consulting on an Australian Open Government National Action Plan, 14 to 18 December in Brisbane 14 Dec, Sydney 15 Dec, Canberra 16 Dec and Melbourne 17 Dec. The Canberra event will also be webcast: (Twitter hashtag #ogpau).

Hopefully this will be more successful than the PM&C 2011 consultations on Cyber Security, which has produced no white paper, four years later.

First Australian CKAN Meetup in Sydney

Greetings from the NICTA Building in Sydney, where a Australian CKAN Meetup is happening. This is believed to be the first such event in Sydney. Steven De Costa, Co-Organizer, has been giving us an overview of what the CKAN open source data portal software

can do and what people around the world are doing with it. He is proposing an Asia-Pacific-CKAN-Meetup on-line every second Thursday, starting 17 September

Steven suggested this suitable as a project for university students to work on as there are only about twenty people working on the code at present.

CKAN is implemented using Python, Javascript, PostgresSQL and Solr. It is primarily used by governments to provide details of their data, including such data.gov.uk, the USA's Data.gov and the Australian data.gov.au/.

GovHack 2015 Starts in Canberra

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra where GovHack 2015 has just started. There are about 200 participants in Canberra and another 2,000 at other locations around Australia who will be building applications using free open access government data over the next 48 hours.

ANU is hosting Climathon next weekend, to come up with responses to climate change for Australian cities.

Founding Canberra's Information Economy

Greetings from the Open Knowledge Australia event on "Open Data and Digital Services: Foundations for a New Information Economy", which is, appropriately enough being held at NICTA Canberra. The event goes until 4pm (and then we are off to the UniPub across the road), if you would like to join us.

Nicholas Gruen, Chair of Open Knowledge Australia, gave an amusing introduction on the history of public goods, before getting on to suggest more seriously that open data about the economy could reduce damaging economic cycles.

Jed Sundwall, Global Open Data Technical BDM for Amazon Web Services, mentioned that there is Landsat Satellite Data on AWS. This is a cleaver move as customers will need to pay for a lot of AWS processing to process the satellite data.

Brendan Bouffler: Scientific Computing, Amazon Web Services talked about how to process data from the Square Kilometer Array in the cloud.

Upcoming:

Pia Waugh:  Director of Analytics and Discovery Layer, Digital Transformation Office
Steve Bennett: Community Contributor, Open Knowledge Australia
Steven De Costa: Open Knowledge Australia, CKAN Association and Link Digital
Maree Adshead: CEO, Open Data Institute Queensland

Digital Services for a New Economy in Canberra

The free event "Open Data and Digital Services: Foundations for a New Information Economy" by Open Knowledge Australia is at NICTA Canberra, 2:30 to 5:30pm, 13 May 2015.

"Hear from leading speakers covering subjects related to open data and digital Government service delivery.

Learn about the foundational elements of a new information economy that is already connecting public and private sectors throughout Australia and the world."

With:

Nicholas Gruen: Chair of Open Knowledge Australia
Jed Sundwall: Global Open Data Technical BDM for Amazon Web Services
Pia Waugh:  Director of Analytics and Discovery Layer, Digital Transformation Office
Steve Bennett: Community Contributor, Open Knowledge Australia
Steven De Costa: Open Knowledge Australia, CKAN Association and Link Digital

Drinks at 4:30pm.

Book at Eventbrite

ps: I will be discussing "Innovations in Teaching Innovation", 27 April 2015, 4pm, CSIRO seminar room in the ANU CSIT Building in Canberra: http://es.csiro.au/ir-and-friends/