I was originally going to write a post responding to the Federal Governments response to the Gov2au Taskforce final report and how it relates to Local Government. However I think one of the recommendations deserves its own post.

For the past three weeks I've been taking part in something call Local Gov Chat on twitter. It's a twitter based moderated conversation  on the subject of Local Government  and various tech and cultural issues.

One of the questions that came up this afternoon was an interesting one:

"What is the difference between openness and transparency?"

The South Australian Government has announced that it's going to be creating an Open Technology Foundation. From it's vision statement:
The OTF is committed to the evaluation and where proven, uptake of open technologies, standards and methods.

The OTF exists to help governments make better, more cost effective and innovative use of open technologies in order to improve service delivery to citizens.

You know I half expected to see this sort of story from here in Australia rather than the UK.

From this story the Royal Mail has moved to prevent a third party service from providing an API with up to date Postcode information sourced directly from the Royal Mail itself. This action has had a domino effect, causing issues with those sites that had come to rely on the third party service.

You know what I love about the whole public discussion thing? It makes things happen, in public even.

A few days ago I blogged my concerns about the contract that those who were successful in tendering for Gov2 Taskforce projects were expected to sign. I still have those concerns, however since then there has been an ongoing discussion between the Gov2 Taskforce, Microsoft and the community about the best way to move forward.

Now that I've had my say on the Draft Contract I thought I would extend my congratulations to the Gov2 Taskforce for the launch of mashupaustralia.org
Mashup Australia looks like a JFDI effort on behalf of the Gov2 Taskforce. Instead of getting bogged down in the endless discussions about risks/benefit analysis they've gone ahead and sourced a variety of different datasets, setup a competition and gone ahead and Done It.
Well done.

So the Gov2 Taskforce has released the contract that everyone who wishes to participate in any Gov2 Taskforce projects has to sign. Fair enough, no one expected it to be carte blanch.

While we're still waiting with bated breath for the details of the NSW Governments Apps4NSW competition, it appears that the NSW Government has released the first Dataset for third party use.

The Transport Data Exchange Programme is a programme to allow third party developers to build applications based on the Timetable and Service information released by the various Public Transport operators.

Below is a quick OOOG Review of the programme:

Open Source: 5

I'll admit it I have a need to play with new toys. If I see something cool and shiny I will sit down with it, take it apart and then try and put it back together. If I'm lucky I discover something I can use in my work or home life, if not then it's been a bit of fun and I've learnt something new.

I've been doing this pulling apart and putting back together with the Google Wave stuff for a little while now, and seriously I'm very blown away. However I have also been playing with new shiny thing called status.net.

Over the past few months I've been asked about the range of Open Source Social Networking Tools, so I thought it might be an idea to put up a page which lists those that I know of with a brief description of each.

Drupal

Drupal is a general Content Management System, however with the use of a range of different third party modules, it can be turned into quite a decent "Social Networking" facility. If nothing else it integrates very well with other tools such as twitter, status.net, facebook, etc, etc.