Senator Lundy describes her Public Sphere initiative

A ten minute video "Senator Lundy describes her Public Sphere initiative" is now available. This was made for my students at ANU studying Information Technology in Electronic Commerce COMP3410. For an assignment the students have to work out what metadata is appropriate to support such public discussions and to archive video used in policy making.

Public Sphere uses a mix of blogs, wikis, instant messaging, video and other tools, in different formats on different systems. This is fine for a pilot, but if this approach is to be used routinely for public policy making, then a system which allows easier set-up, use and archiving all of the material (perhaps for hundreds of years) is needed.

Government 2.0 Taskforce - Road Show starts consulting the public on 17 August in Canberra, followed by other locations around Australia, ending in Darwin on 2nd September 2009. The Taskforce has 15 experts chaired by Nicolas Gluin and was announced at Public Sphere 2 (Video & transcript available).

The open source XENA tool ("XML Electronic Normalising of Archives") which National Archives of Australia use can then be modified to convert discussions and video from public policy events into a long term storage formats.