Tag: access

May 31, 2011

Accessing Australia: The Challenges of Digitisation

Senator Lundy gave a speech at the “HASS on the Hill” conference as part of a session on Accessing Australia: the challenges of digitisation. HASS on the Hill is an event coordinated by the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) for the humanities, arts and social sciences sector to communicate with government and policy makers.

Senator Lundy spoke at the event on behalf of Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, and the speech below was a collaborative effort between our offices.

Speech Notes

It was not so long ago, in December 2008, that the newest national cultural institution – the National Portrait Gallery – opened its doors.
From the very start it was a resounding success, with visitor numbers far exceeding initial projections.

The eagerness with which Australians embraced this cultural institution says a great deal about the importance we place on our cultural collections and our access to them.

The new National Portrait Gallery sits within Canberra’s cultural precinct. As much as I would like to encourage as many visitors to Canberra as possible, realistically, not everyone is going to have that opportunity.

That opportunity lies elsewhere. That opportunity lies in the digitisation of our national treasures.

March 6, 2011

Ten Principles for Designing Open Government Institutions

The below tweets are @ThomKearney‘s attempt to share part of @BethNoveck‘s testimony to Cdn Parliament http://ow.ly/48GeM #w2p #goc on March 2nd, 2011

1. Go Open – Government should work in the open. contracts, grants, legislation, regulation and policies should be transparent #w2p #goc

2. Open Gov Includes Open Access – After the public has paid once, it shouldn’t have to pay again. #w2p #goc

3. Make Open Gov Productive Not Adversarial –Gov”t shld invest in providing the data that people really want and will use. #w2p #goc

4. Be Collaborative – Rulemaking should be open to public early to allow for constructive alternative proposals. #w2p #goc

5. Love Data – Design policies informed by real-time data. Release data for economic benefit. See http://ow.ly/48Ga7 for more #w2p #goc

6. Be Nimble – Forcing organizations to act quickly discourages bureaucracy and encourages creative brainstorming and innovation. #goc #w2p

7. Do More, Spend Less – Design solutions that do more with less. Instead of cutting… ask if there is another way…#w2p #goc

8. Invest in Platforms – … Focus on going forward practices of creating raw data and real engagement. #w2p #goc

9. Invest in People – Changing the culture of government will not happen through statements of policy alone…. #w2p #goc

10. Design for Democracy..ask if legislation enables engagement that uses people’s abilities and enthusiasm for the collective. #w2p #goc

Ten Principles from Beth Noveck @BethNoveck related via Twitter by @ThomKearney

December 22, 2010

Open Formats & Open Source for Better Government

The Government of Canada is currently reliant on proprietary file formats and proprietary software applications, which lock it into a licensing bind with a single software manufacturer — Microsoft. There is not only a question of cost — as we pay a monopoly corporation for per-seat licenses to run software that already dominates the market — but more importantly, there is the question of future access to our own data. In this post, I’d like to share my thoughts on both issues.

Before you dismiss the idea of a major institution losing access to its stored data as ludicrous, consider this quote from Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the UK National Archives:

“If you put paper on shelves, it’s pretty certain it is going to be there in a hundred years. If you stored something on a floppy disc just three or four years ago [2003-04], you’d have a hard time finding a modern computer capable of opening it. Digital information is in fact inherently far more ephemeral than paper. The pace of software and hardware developments means we are living in the world of a ticking time bomb when it comes to digital preservation.”

The UK National Archives includes a collection of 900 years of written material. As of 2007 they estimated that 580 terabytes of their data (the equivalent of 580,000 encyclopedias) was stored in file formats which have since become extinct.