Last week, Senator Kate Lundy announced the launch of a new event. The Public Sphere.
"Although there are certainly many formal mechanisms for participation in Australian Government processes, we thought it would be a great idea to create an online public sphere and facilitate regular topics of interest to both the general public and to the government. This way people from all around Australia can participate online. We will be experimenting with different technologies to get the recipe right for this kind of engagement, and any thoughts on this are very welcome.
Each Public Sphere will run for two weeks, and then all feedback will be summarised per topic and put into briefing papers that we will make available on this website and to the appropriate channels in government."
The topic of the first Public Sphere is "High Bandwidth For Australia". When the call for talks went out I figured why not, it seems like an excellent way to start connecting the community back with the politicians, and the idea of regularly getting thinkers together on a range of different topics intrigues me.
The other thing that is cool about the Public Sphere is that it isn't limited by geography. Senator Lundy is a well known tech tragic (she's maintained her own site for years and was podcasting before all the cool kids), so not only will the Public Sphere discussion be live videocasted but twittering during the event is encouraged and several talks (including my own) will be in the form of pre-recorded videos.
My own talk is going to be about High Speed Broadband and the opportunities for Online Collaboration. At first we were going to attempt a live remote talk, but given that this is the first Public Sphere it was felt that the pre-recorded video cut out any potential snafu.
For those who aren't going to be attending the Public Sphere, I've put the video up on youtube and the slides are up on slideshare: