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December 10, 2008
We have a government blog. woo hoo.
Conroy and Tanner want to know what we think about the future of the digital economy.
We plan to release a draft of the paper for detailed feedback shortly; but in the meantime, it seemed logical to us to use one of the key communications platforms of the digital economy—blogs—as a way to engage with you and your ideas.
Very sensible. And there's some interesting stuff on the way.
Some of the themes that we will explore in upcoming blog posts include:
What does the digital economy encompass?
How do we maintain the same 'civil society' we enjoy offline in an online world? (this is the post that touches on the issue of filtering and we welcome your feedback about the issue in response to this post)
Is there a benefit for the digital economy from open access to public sector information?
Does Australia's regulatory framework need tweaking to enable a vibrant digital economy in Australia?
How can the digital economy respond to environmental concerns?
What should Australia do to ensure that our businesses and citizens have the necessary skills to participate fully in the digital economy?
How can we measure the success of Australia's digital economy?
The second point is an interesting one. What, exactly, is meant by 'civil society', let alone 'same civil society'? This is where we have a say about ISP filtering, so I wonder whether it's defined in terms of governance rather than prevailing values. If you were to theorise it you'd have to start thinking about the different cultural norms in on and offline settings, and risk upsetting people who claim nothing new is happening. Anyhoo, we'll find out when the post arrives.
Dave Bath is seriously pleased, but warns it's in the trial phases, "a trial run of a prototype component of a suite of improvements to mechanisms allowing two-way consultation between government and citizens", which probably means we should be nice if we want it to continue. Although,
Indeed, the more you want to be able to criticize (and make suggestions to) government, the more important it is to help get these incoming tools sanity-checked, by as many eyes as possible, before the tools are set in stone, rolled out across all agencies, and we are stuck with something awful that allows governments to ignore us (or even have deniability that they can hear us).
Robert Merkel is a tad skeptical,
I’m not entirely convinced this is going to work. Governments around Australia have become increasingly paranoid about being “on message” - not without justification, since Oppositions and media outlets pounce on the slightest deviations from uniformity as the indication of a government in disarray. Such a climate makes it very difficult to hold a substantive two-way conversation about policy.
It's a good point. You and I will be over there doing the citizen thing, but the opposition and its friends in the press will also be over there rooting around for ammo. In theory that's the right and proper democratic thing to happen, but it's also likely to ensure that it's a fairly bland exercise.
I haven't read the moderation policy yet, but it should be interesting to watch how that pans out. It will be a tricky thing to get right, but let's hope it doesn't descend into a manipulative farce.
Update:
Off to a running start. 230-odd comments on Lindsay Tanner's welcome. In the first 10 pages (most recent on top), two comments don't mention filtering and two support it. The rest are a large mob of very angry people. Plenty of IT types patiently explaining why it won't work, but mostly people upset about censorship.
There are whopping great chunks of the population who only ever use the net for banking and reading the news, but the trend is towards more adventurous stuff like networking and blogging. These are the spaces where newcomers get their introduction to the wilds of the intertubes. It also looks as though this kind of thing is where business use and our future digital economy are headed.
If banking and newsing mums and dads with porn surfing kiddies support filtering while they're only using these narrow spaces, you have to figure that won't last long.
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where's Conroy? isn't he the Broadband Minister?