Month: September 2009

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NSW offers $100k prizes for application development

Crikey logo

In a surprise visit to today’s NSW Sphere event, Premier Nathan Rees announced the apps4nsw program — offering prizes of $100,000 for innovative applications with make use of government data for public good.

I’ve got a piece on the Crikey website, NSW gets its geek on:

“This is all about making government data easy for everyone to use to solve everyday problems,” said Rees…

Entries may be websites or web based services, mobile applications or stand-alone PC based or kiosk-based applications.

“The prizes will be judged by an expert panel – which doesn’t include me – and there will also be a People’s Choice Award and the opportunity for the best entry to go to a prototyping phase”, said Rees.

“Anything we develop as a result of the competition will be licensed as open source and freely available to government and the public. These will be public apps for the common good.”

This is a fascinating initiative. Have a squizz at the Crikey piece. I’ll write more later.

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NSW Sphere: Government 2.0 for NSW

I should’ve written more about this earlier, but today I’m speaking at NSW Sphere, a discussion event on Government 2.0 organised by Penny Sharpe MLC.

It’s being run along the style of Senator Kate Lundy’s Public Sphere events, and interest is so high that all places are booked out.

As I write this, some early-bird participants are watching the movie Us Now, and I’m figuring out exactly what I’ll say in my 10-minute presentation, Risk, Fear, Paranoia: Perspective, People!

You can participate live wherever you are, and I’ll post my presentation and thoughts later. The Twitter hashtag is #nswsphere.

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Your Cnuts for episode 53 are…?

Cnut of the Week graphic

The time has come! There will be an edition of Stilgherrian Live tonight from 9.30pm Sydney time. You’d better start nominating people and things for “Cnut of the Week”.

“Cnut of the Week” is where we honour the example set by King Cnut the Great, who demonstrated to his sycophantic courtiers that trying to hold back the tide is pointless.

We’re after your suggestions for people, organisations or other entities who are futilely trying to hold back the tide of change — especially changes wrought by our increasingly networked digital society. It has to be related to something in the news in the last week, and you have to explain yourself. Nominees have to be not merely doing bad things, but failing to notice or adapt to the change around them. And you have to nominate here, in a comment on this post, for your entry to count.

We’ll have our usual offer of a t-shirt of your choice from our friends at King Cnut Ethical Clothing. Just nominate a “Cnut of the Week” and be watching the program when we draw a name from the Cocktail Shaker of Integrity.

(Of course, neither me nor King Cnut Ethical Clothing are as lame and unethical as to share your email address with anyone else. I for one have site policies about this sort of thing, and so do they.)

Who do you nominate, and why?