The promo sayeth:

In a connected world where information sharing is easier and has more impact than ever before, is the current framework of FOI, information security, privacy and archives laws and practices delivering the information society needs in a timely and appropriate way? This panel discussion will be about:

• assessing the effectiveness of current information access and security laws and methods — are they hopelessly broken?
• the culture of secrecy and withholding by government agencies
• how technology and activism offer those with the skills and motivation some alternative and very powerful ways to access and reveal information, and
• what can be done to address the current state of things and move to better ways of making information available when and where it’s needed.

I think I’ll be rabbiting on about the internet and stuff. Information security, digital distribution, authentication of records, WikiLeaks, Anonymous. That sort of thing.

My fellow panelists are former diplomat Dr Philip Dorling, who now leads the journalistic pack in FOI stuff; and Tim Robinson, Manager, Archives and Records Management Services at the University of Sydney. The moderator is Cassie Findlay, Recordkeeping Roundtable co-founder and digital archivist.

It’s at the Australian Technology Park, Redfern, Sydney, and doors open at 5.30pm for a 6.00pm start. It wraps at 7.30pm for dinner. Admission is $5 and you should probably register.

For some reason the audio quality on these recordings is rubbish. I’ll let you know if better versions are ever posted.

The keynote was given by leading UK political blogger Iain Dale. The other panellists were Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister; Joe Hockey MP, Shadow Treasurer; Dr Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; Microsoft’s Gianpaolo Carraro; and yours truly. The moderator was Mark Pesce.

You can also listen to my interview with Iain Dale, should you be so inclined.

Previous Microsoft Politics & Technology Forums

The first Forum was in 2008. Thanks to Microsoft’s Nick Hodge, you can view videos of Matt Bai’s keynote address, Panel 1 on Blogging, social networks, political movements and the media with Annabel Crabb, Peter Black and Mark Textor, and Panel 2 on Politics 2.0: information technology and the future of political campaigning with Joe Hockey, Senator Andrew Bartlett, Senator Kate Lundy and Antony Green.

During this first event, I provided commentary via Twitter and was, um, generally helpful to the discussion from the audience. My most important outburst is during the first panel discussion, though I can be heard but not seen. I have yet to dig the tweets out of Twitter’s archive.

The second Forum was in 2009, with the theme “Campaigning Online”. I did a live blog, and later turned my notes of Joe Trippi’s keynote address into the post Notes on Obama’s election campaign.

I daresay there are videos somewhere, but I couldn’t be arsed looking for them just now.

And in the lead-up and especially on the day, you’ll be able to follow everyone’s tweets using the hashtag #poltech.

I’ve attended the previous two Microsoft Politics & Technology Forums in Canberra as their guest, but this year there’s a difference. I’ll be on stage. The date is 1 June 2011. The venue is the Parliament House Theatrette. And it’s free.

The theme is Do we trust the internet? That’s all about openness and transparency in politics.

Technology and politics is more interwoven than ever before.

We’ve seen sensitive government information being revealed on Wikileaks, and mobilisation of communities across the Middle East using social media resulting in regime change in Tunisia, Egypt and unrest in Libya and Bahrain.

The first social media election in the UK saw an incoming Conservative Coalition government, overturning 13 years of Labor rule. David Cameron’s Conservative party trumped other parties in social media campaigning.

The Australian Government has its own Declaration of Open Government, a central recommendation of the Government 2.0 Taskforce. The declaration promotes “greater participation in Australia’s democracy, and is committed to open government based on a culture of engagement, built on better access to and use of government held information, and sustained by the innovative use of technology.”

This and much more will be discussed when UK’s leading political blogger Iain Dale (pictured) will be addressing Microsoft’s 3rd Politics and Technology Forum: Openness and Transparency in Politics. The Forum is supported by Open Forum.

Iain Dale will then participate in a panel discussion of distinguished speakers including Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister; Joe Hockey MP, Shadow Treasurer; Stilgherrian; and Microsoft’s Gianpaolo Carraro. The event MC is Mark Pesce.

I’m particularly amused by the facts that I’m “distinguished” and that I’m not explained by any job title or description. I am self-explanatory. Or possibly indescribable.

It’ll cost you nothing to register for this free event, but you’ll need to use the SEKRIT ticket code. Which is “dale”.

Previous Microsoft Politics & Technology Forums

The first Forum was in 2008. Thanks to Microsoft’s Nick Hodge, you can view videos of Matt Bai’s keynote address, Panel 1 on Blogging, social networks, political movements and the media with Annabel Crabb, Peter Black and Mark Textor, and Panel 2 on Politics 2.0: information technology and the future of political campaigning with Joe Hockey, Senator Andrew Bartlett, Senator Kate Lundy and Antony Green.

During this first event, I provided commentary via Twitter and was, um, generally helpful to the discussion from the audience. My most important outburst is during the first panel discussion, though I can be heard but not seen. I have yet to dig the tweets out of Twitter’s archive.

The second Forum was in 2009, with the theme “Campaigning Online”. I did a live blog, and later turned my notes of Joe Trippi’s keynote address into the post Notes on Obama’s election campaign.

I daresay there are videos somewhere, but I couldn’t be arsed looking for them just now.

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth — and this week I’ve done a lot of writing.

Articles

• The information ‘vacuum’ over secretive ISP data retention scheme, for Crikey. The Attorney-General’s Department has been holding discussions with internet service providers and others about the potential for ISPs to retain customer data for use by law enforcement agencies. Secret discussions. Last week a Senate Inquiry initiated by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam dug out some details. The Twitterverse is using the hashtag #ozlog for this issue.
• Information Commissioner’s toe in the Government 2.0 waters, for Crikey. On 1 November the new Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) opened for business. The first Information Commissioner, Professor John McMillan, is showing political nous from day one. (As an aside, I’ve interviewed him for the next edition of the Patch Monday podcast, which will be posted on, erm, Monday.)
• Citizen journalism is dead, long live crowdsourcing, for Crikey. At Wednesday’s Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, some media folks talked about the changes in journalism that are being triggered by this buzzword.
• Timeline of misinformation: Twitter’s plane crash down to human error, for Crikey. On Thursday, media outlets including Reuters and Fox News were actually reporting that Qantas flight QF32 had crashed in Indonesia when, in fact, it ended up landing safely in Singapore.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 63, “The govt’s data retention dreams revealed”. If you’d prefer to listen to the edited highlights of that Senate hearing rather than read about it, this is the go.

Media Appearances

• Parity Bit episode 1. A new IT-related video podcast produced and presented by Owen Kelly. I was chatting with him and the other panellists about #ozlog and other news stories. I didn’t swear once.

Geekery

Not a sausage.

Corporate Largesse

• I got free entry to the Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, of course, and they provided lunch.
• As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been invited to San Francisco by Salesforce.com.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Enmore village in the spring rain, taken from the Warren View Hotel. Compare this with the similar view from a few weeks ago.]

School anti-bullying programs make life difficult for the US Army. Senator Conroy illustrates the Rudd government’s non-commitment to transparent by not releasing the NBN report. And some weird-arsed stoush erupts between Australia and Encyclopaedia Dramatica.

So, it’s Friday night and The 9pm Edict is late. Do you care? Really? Here it is anyway.

You can listen to this episode below. But if you want them all, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.

For more information on what I discussed tonight, check out the Encyclopedia Dramatica article on “Aboriginal” and the story of the Australian Human Rights Commission action and ED‘s owner’s response; the Zen Pundit post on the US Army and Free Range Kids; and Senator Stephen Conroy on Lateline.

If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission.]

My world was dominated by Telstra last week. Apart from my writing and a radio spot about the government’s plans to split the telco, I also spoke on ABC Radio National’s Future Tense on Thursday about the sudden closure of their nowwearetalking blog.

I’d already written about that shutdown here and over at Crikey. However the Radio National conversation was in the more general context of how social media is affecting corporate transparency.

You can listen to the program (at least for now) and read the full transcript over at the ABC’s website. The other guests were Shel Holtz, co-author of Tactical Transparency; Mark Hannah, a New York-based communications consultant; Mike Hickinbotham, Telstra’s Social Media Senior Advisor; and ABC economic correspondent Stephen Long. well worth checking out.

Here’s the full text of my section.

Antony Funnell (ABC): Now one of Australia’s prominent bloggers on communications trends and politics is Stilgherrian. So what did he make of the Telstra decision to close nowwearetalking?

Stilgherrian: I’m not surprised, but I think it was a false step. They really had started to turn it round from being the propaganda piece it was, to something that was much more conversational with their customers and with the people who were interested in what they were doing. But the problem is, all of that four years of previous negativity was still online, and I can understand that a big corporation just wants to obliterate the memory of that, for two reasons.

One, to stop people finding it and hitting them over the head with it, but also for the new management team really to mark their territory. There’s a lot of that, shall we say, weeing on the tree happening I think, and this is just the corporate equivalent.

Antony Funnell: So you do think though that in the latter stages of that website’s life, that they were genuine in their attempt to be more transparent with their customer base?

Stilgherrian: Genuine as much as they could within the kind of corporate culture that Telstra has. They are still very much a control-the-message, top-down PR kind of organisation. It will take a long time to turn that around.

Antony Funnell: Now leaving Telstra to the side, this whole notion of transparency in business, where companies use social media tools, use the Internet to try and give across a message that they’re being transparent, that they’re being more open, how real do you think that actually is?

Stilgherrian: There are some companies who really are trying to do it, and I can think of 37signals who, well they’re sort of based in Chicago, but they have people all over the place. They go to the extent of really discussing in public how they’re making their design decisions about their product. They discuss quite openly when they have any service difficulties and so on. For other companies, it’s pretending to be transparent, they’re trying to look as if they’re transparent, but they’re still really trying to control it, so when they have a situation that’s not perfect, that’s going wrong, they still don’t want to talk to you about that, they only want to be transparent when it’s a happy message.

It is going to be hard for them to deal with that. It’s going to take perhaps a generational change before we accept, or before the corporations and their senior executives accept that you can admit to the occasional failure, and people will not crucify you for that, in fact they might be happier if you’re honest and say ‘Look, we stuffed up there, and this is what we’ve done to fix it’, and that magic word, ‘Sorry’.

Antony Funnell: You mentioned generational change there; do you believe that as that generation that is very familiar with social media, as they grow up, as they get older and start moving into management, is there a hope that they will be more willing to engage, more willing to be transparent?

Stilgherrian: My own feeling is that if you talk to any 15-year-old now, they’re already (or even a 20-year-old) they’re already making so much more of their life public than you or I would have ever thought of, and don’t think anything of it. I’m almost tempted to say that all of the ‘keep your dirty washing behind closed doors’ is very much Victorian-era prudery.

Before people separated out into their lovely middle-class terrace homes in London or Manchester or wherever, then people were all bundled together, they did see each other’s lives, both good points and bad points. And I think they were much more judged on how they were as a person than on the image they projected as a worthy citizen.

Perhaps we’re going back more to that time. In terms of how those younger people will move through organisations, I think that gradually they’ll be turned off from organisations that don’t accept them for the actual human beings that they are, with warts and all.

They will soon talk amongst themselves about whether someone was sacked from a job because they had an inappropriate photograph on Facebook, and gradually those organisations will find it harder and harder to hire talented, creative people, the kind of people they need to create the future, and instead they will be stuck with the dull conformists that just don’t have anything interesting on Facebook because they don’t have anything interesting in their life.

[Disclaimer: This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers. I have made some minor corrections.]

Marcus Westbury, who I’ve written about before, has noticed something special about Australia’s new defence minister.

“John Faulkner [pictured left] hasn’t changed his glasses for so long they’re almost fashionable again,” he tweets. “Do you think if I start referring to John Faulkner as ‘the hispter’ it will catch on? He has the retro ironic glasses for it.”

“It’s gonna be awesome to see those glasses in the back of an F-35 or sticking out of a tank. Cartoonists will love this,” Marcus reckons. And I reckon too.

So, dear Australian political writers and cartoonists, can we please start referring to Senator John Faulkner as “The Hipster”?

Marcus also wonders about the fate of the Rudd government’s transparency program, which Faulkner was driving in his role as Special Minister of State. “It was the most impressive thing about the Rudd government,” says Marcus. “What now?”

A spokesman for the minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, confirmed that saying, “I can confirm that the Australian Communications and Media Authority has provided the Minister with a report on its trial of internet filtering technologies. The Government will consider the report and comment in due course.”

So, will the report be released?

Yesterday I suggested, “It’s a govt report. If results are what’s needed politically, we’ll get a summary. If not, we’ll never hear anything again… This is called responsible government, and what Kevin Rudd thinks is a new era of transparency and evidence-based policy. Bah!”

That is all… for now.

“I supposed at least he was honest,” said Duncan Riley when he passed on this story (pictured).

I’ll reproduce the text here so the search engines find it — which may or may not be a Good Thing. My website ends up in enough weird searches as it is.

Burglary

A 38-year-old Cole Avenue man reported that his home was invaded on Sept. 9. The man said that he was sitting home alone masturbating and watching a pornographic movie when a man came down into the basement, holding a gun, and started to videotape him. The man said that before he left, the intruder fed his dog some mushrooms and the dog died.

The story is supposedly from The Beacon Journal, Sunday 21 September 2003. If it’s a fake, someone’s gone to a lot of trouble.

Now, is this the weirdest crime story you’ve heard recently? Please, links to even weirder ones!

OK, that’s set the tone for the day…

When Chairman Rudd announced the Australia 2020 Summit the euphoria kicked in like a clean hit of a fresh new political drug. After 11 drab years of John Winston Howard, Change! Big, bright colourful change with sparkly bits and the sound of a thousand sitars! But now the euphoria’s wearing off. We’re coming down — and the Main Event is still a month away.

Kevin still looks pretty cheerful, though, doesn’t he. Why is that?

Look back through everything I’ve written so far and you can see the moodswing. “Chairman Rudd’s got a clever strategy going,” my first post began. Another post was headlined Australia, let the Enlightenment begin!, quoting Maxine “Toadslayer” McKew and agreeing that the nation was ready to start a new conversation about its destiny. At the end of February I even nominated myself.

Given Rudd’s claim that his government would be open and transparent, and develop policies based on evidence, it all sounded pretty good.

As days go by, however, it’s become increasingly clear that the potential of the event will be stifled by the political “need” to placate the same old whingeing lobby groups, the same old middle-class middle-aged white men in dark suits (just flick through the Steering Committee) and, it seems, the “need” to pre-load the agenda with specific topics to… well, let’s explore that.

There’s two brilliant critiques of the process so far. Please, read them in full before continuing — though I’ll give you a summary here if you’re in a hurry.

The ABC’s Media Watch ran a story this week, I’m having a Summit and you’re invited, which highlighted Rudd’s technique of openly inviting specific high-profile journalists and getting key media outlets to nominate “ordinary Australians” — ensuring they’d be supportive.

In the past couple of weeks, the Prime Minister’s Office has invited twenty media organisations — they’ve sent us a list — to select a reader, listener or viewer and to pay for them to go to Canberra.

That’s not including News Ltd’s big kahuna, John Hartigan, who of course is chairing one of the summit sessions.

It’s not surprising that News Ltd papers have eagerly joined the search for summiteers.

Like Sydney’s Daily Telegraph…

“You can help shape our future”
— Daily Telegraph, You can help shape our future, 3rd March, 2008

Australia’s 1000 “best and brightest” is gradually diluted.

Meanwhile, the Centre for Policy Development‘s article Beyond the 2020 Summit asks us to imagine what we actually do after this magic weekend.

You would think that the Government’s stated objectives for the Summit would be a good place to start. Here we scrutinise just two: harnessing the best ideas across the nation and producing options for consideration by Government.

Objective: To harness the best ideas across the nation.

This might be difficult to measure and doing so will be a very long-term exercise. For those who missed out on their opportunity to present their ideas at all, it is probably a sore point. Candidates had to write 100 words to justify their inclusion and many with wonderful ideas would not have considered themselves worthy of consideration. From amongst those bold enough to apply, can we be certain that the Steering Committee did not filter out potentially radical ideas in their participant selection process? No matter how open-minded the selectors, it is certain that the Summit was a select group rather than a genuine opportunity to generate the best ideas Australians could offer.

Objective: To produce options for consideration by the Government.

This is hardly a firm commitment to do anything in particular with the ideas. As well, there was a promise that a public response would be produced by the end of 2008. The decision-making process is hardly transparent; it is not clear who will decide which ideas are capable of being shaped into concrete policy responses. This objective, unfortunately, will most likely lead to contributors at the Summit passively awaiting the Government’s response. Moreover they will be unaware of how the output of the Summit will be processed. Of course they are the ‘lucky’ ones. Those who never made it, especially those who will potentially be affected by policy responses emanating from the Summit, will feel even more obsolete.

The authors rather wish that the Summit’s objectives had instead been modelled on some principles on best practice in community engagement that are expressed in The Brisbane Declaration 2005, endorsed by over 2000 attendees from 44 countries of the International Conference for Engaging Communities, a conference hosted by the Queensland Government and the United Nations.

The CPD proposes what some people may think a radical solution for the follow-up. Instead of bureaucrats analysing the options behind closed doors, you choose 100 random citizens for each policy area and have them evaluate the ideas.

The randomly-selected citizens are presented with ideas from the Summit and able to obtain clarification from the authors. Rather than just private submissions lodged through the Summit website, all Australians are encouraged to participate in e-panels (electronic issues-based forums) that simultaneously discuss the ideas. The randomly-selected citizens have access to all these views as well, including new ideas or concerns that emerge.

This is remarkably similar to an idea first floated by futurist Alvin Toffler in his 1970s book The Third Wave: if you truly want parliament to represent the people, you could just choose a representative sample of the people. Randomly. It’s one of many fascinating ideas he runs through.

It’s also remarkably similar to Mark Pesce’s proposal, How to listen to 21 million voices.

Hey, I think they might be onto something here. Open, transparent policy development!

Gosh.

Now I’ve already written how I don’t think “representation” should be the model for selecting participants, but this seems a great way of involving everybody.

So, Dear Chairman Rudd and well-suited Steering Committee members (and Cate Blanchett), you have a choice.

1. Treat the Australia 2020 Summit as a political exercise to create the perception of a new long-term vision for Australia and pat yourselves and a smiling PM on the back.
2. Actually harness the potential of new ideas. Use some of the best resources of our nation — our minds, our wonderful, varied multicultural and multi-experienced minds, all of them! — to process and filter and come up with something really new. You could even use the Summit to showcase the kind of open, transparent, evidence-based government you’ve been talking about.

So far, alas, it looks like you’re choosing the same old cynical, corrupt Option 1.

Binge drinking is guaranteed a spot on the agenda, apparently. Important perhaps, yes, but I’d have thought the topic panels would decide their own agenda — you know, fresh ideas from the panellists to think “outside the box”.

How many other topics have already been loaded this way?

Well, we don’t know, because there’s been no news from the summit secretariat in a fortnight! You think there’d be something to say, even if it was just to confirm officially how many nominations you’d received, how far you are through the selection process, when we’ll know who’s selected, whether you’ve chosen the tenderer to run the event yet, when the timetable for the summit will be announced — that sort of thing.

We can accept that this is all being made up as we go along. After all the world is made up as we go along. In the 21st Century, though, some of us are used to seeing that “background chatter” as things get done. It helps reassure us that things actually are getting done — and done honestly — even though it might not be fully polished and glistening in the sun yet.

Wow, there’s transparency for you.

Alastair Rankine writes that the Macworld Keynote has moved from slick-but-reality-distorted marketing into the realms of straight-out entertainment, and then criticises Randy Newman’s performance. Not because it was crap (which, being Randy Newman, is inevitable), but because it was political.

Criticism of the Bush administration is something I obviously have a lot of time for. But is it suitable for a consumer product launch? …

Mix politics with business and you take a risk with a relatively small upside but a big downside. If your politics match mine, we are no more likely to do business together than before we knew each other’s positions. But if our politics disagree, this difference becomes a barrier that we each have to overcome in order to do business together.

I’m not arguing for censorship or anything. I’m just saying that the separation of politics and business is crucial for the success of both.

I disagree.

Business is about making money, yes, but sometimes I think it’s wrong to “leave politics at the door”. In fact, is it even possible?

Here’s how I responded on Alastair’s website:

Deciding to continue doing business with someone even though you disagree with their political aims is a political decision: a decision to wimp out and fail to pursue your own political goals. A decision to support your political enemy because money is more important to you than your principles.

Mind you, I fail to live up to my own high-sounding rhetoric.

I faced an ethical dilemma. I discovered that one of my clients is run by members of Hillsong Church — an organisation which worries me. Did I stop working for them? No. Or at least I haven’t yet. However I have turned down a project which would have been working directly with the Church’s own business interests.

On the other hand, can I be accused of religious discrimination? Perhaps. How would it have sounded if I said “I don’t work for Jews”?

It’s presumably OK to say “I don’t work for the baby-sacrificing Turnip Cult”, though, so where does one draw the line?

Was Apple wrong to include political commentary in a product launch? (Did that happen because Al Gore is an Apple board member?) Where does one draw the line between business and politics (and religion)?

More than a million Australians signed 900+ petitions during Howard’s final three-year term. A grand total of 2 were responded to in some way. The other 99.8% were tabled and ignored.

My local MP Anthony Albanese, the “manager of government business” in parliament, says petitions won’t need to be sponsored by an MP any more. He reckons citizens have a basic right to petition parliament. And they’ll look into electronic petitions too.

That, and Julia Gillard’s announcement that NGOs receiving government funds would no longer be prevented from making political statements, are clear sings that maybe Kevin Rudd actually means what he says about strengthening the parliamentary system.