NSW highlights open data as one of four focuses in the Premier's Innovation Initiative

The NSW government today launched the NSW Premier's Innovation Initiative, a program seeking expressions of interest in projects that support NSW government innovation in four focal areas - Congestion, Social Housing Assets, Open Ideas and Open Data.

The process will invite organisations and individuals to submit Expressions of Interest setting out proposals the government could consider in one or more focal area.

Following this, selected respondents will be invited to submit full proposals for funding and implementation consideration.

While this process is far more complex and bureaucratic that similar processes I've seen run in the US, UK and other nations , it is great to see a government in Australia taking the step to formally ask the community for ideas and proposals to improve aspects of the state and government.

The inclusion of Open Data is quite notable. This looks like a genuine and sophisticated attempt to accelerate the NSW open data agenda, involving the consumers of the data in the process of defining what data is released and how.

Given the significant economic value attributed to opening up public sector data it is good to see both the attention and the funding placed behind this initiative - in too many cases we see only one, or neither of these, with open data catalogues run on a shoestring and their managers required to cajole and beg government agencies into participating by supplying data.

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Support the Emergency 2.0 wiki's founder to present and participate in the 5th International Disaster and Risk Conference in Switzerland

Eileen Culleton, the Founder and CEO of the Emergency 2.0 Wiki has been offered a speaking slot at the 5th International Disaster and Risk Conference (#IDRC2014) and is crowdfunding the money she needs to get there.

The International Disaster and Risk Conference from IDRC is one of the world's premier risk management conferences, attracting over 1,000 delegates from more than 100 countries and supported by hundreds of disaster and risk management organisations, associations and not-for-profits around the world. This year it is being held from 24-28 August in Davos, Switzerland.

The Emergency 2.0 Wiki is a free online global resource and knowledge sharing hub for using social media and new technologies in emergencies. The wiki serves a global hub for emergency response agencies, government, NGOs, schools, hospitals, community groups, faith based groups, business, media and citizens to use social media to better prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies.

The wiki includes tips, guides, mobile apps, mapping tools, videos and an international directory of emergency services on social media. It has tips for citizens to help themselves and help others, an accessibility toolkit for people with disabilities and guidelines for emergency services, government, community groups and NGOs, schools, hospitals and business.

Eileen runs the wiki (as its voluntary CEO) with the support of a range of volunteers. It does not currently attract funding from governments or risk management organisations.


Eileen's attendance at the 5th International Disaster and Risk Conference is an opportunity to showcase the expertise of Australia's emergency sector and the great work of Australian volunteers within and outside government in building the Emergency 2.0 wiki.

It is an opportunity to highlight and extend Australia's expertise in emergency management to the world.

However this isn't just a speaking slot, it is also an opportunity to shape world emergency management policy into the future.

As a speaker Eileen will be making recommendations for the Post 2015 Disaster Risk Framework that will be ratified at the UN World Conference in Sendai, Japan in 2015.


Eileen ran a previous successful crowdsourcing campaign to raise the funds for the conference fee. She's now crowdfunding her travel.

As a volunteer, Eileen would otherwise have to pay out of her own pocket - which isn't a great way to promote Australia's expertise to the world.

You can support Eileen via her Pozible crowdfounding campaign at www.pozible.com/project/184557

Also please share Eileen's campaign via your social networks, and with your peers across government and the emergency management space.

Every dollar counts!

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ACT Crime Stats data - ready for people to analyse and mashup

At GovHack a few weeks ago my team, The Hack Warriors, wanted to integrate ACT crime data into our project 'Where Should I?'

While the ACT makes the data available visually in the awesome Crime Statistics site, it wasn't available as open data from data.act.gov.au.

So during the weekend I went through the code for the Crime Statistics site and (with a little help) identified where the data was coming from. I was able to download the actual Crime Stats data and process it into a spreadsheet with all the figures by suburb.

For reuse purposes I put the data up as a public Google Fusion table, which anyone can now access via a search of Fusion tables, or via the direct web address: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1Cztgi-LF4CtXtS-EbU1M6JXnZAzPt1wLAH5YdXnN#rows:id=1

What this means is that now anyone who wants to mine the crime statistics for the ACT can do so easily using this table - performing statistical analysis or mashing it up with other data and mapping it easily.

Even better I found that while the ACT Crime Statistics site allowed people to see data back to 2010, the actual data went all the way back to 2007 - providing more historical data than is visually available from the site.

So if you want to play with the actual numbers behind the ACT's Crime Statistics site - you could start with the table below.

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Don't help your official agency and Ministerial photos become parody memes through poor selection and timing

A challenge today for politicians and public servants is how easy it is for a photo or frame from a video to be reused out-of-context to parody, well, literally anything.

We've seen the increasing use of 'photoshopped' images on social media to support all kinds of political and social positions, ranging from the clever and amusing to the downright disturbing.

Two of the most notable examples - which have become memes in their own right - include the 'floating Chinese officials' from 2011, the result of the accidental upload of a poorly photoshopped image of three council officials (below).

The image appeared to show the officials (including the County mayor and vice-mayor) floating above the road and was immediately parodied by internet users, who placed the officials in a range of amusing and inappropriate locations, such as below.

The second example of a government photo-turned-meme was the phone call from David Cameron to President Obama in March this year, where the UK Prime Minister tweeted a serious photo of him listening to a landline phone, claiming he was on the phone to President Obama of the USA to discuss the Ukrainian situation (below).

I've been speaking to @BarackObama about the situation in Ukraine. We are united in condemnation of Russia's actions. pic.twitter.com/7Rk2k8iOIK
— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) March 5, 2014

This was parodied by a range of people, who started by posting tweets of them speaking on the phone, and then on a variety of other items. It even attracted celebrity attention from people like Sir Patrick Stewart (as below), and in the end David Cameron played along and tweeted a photo of him meeting an ex-US President in person.

.@robdelaney @David_Cameron @BarackObama I'm now patched in as well. Sorry for the delay. pic.twitter.com/elLQcKcV3w
— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) March 5, 2014

This second 'on the phone' meme was replicated a month after the Cameron call in Australia when the Prime Minister tweeted a serious photo of himself on the phone addressing the MH17 crisis. This was predictably mocked by many people online in the same vein.

Now while it isn't possible to prevent the 'photoshopping' of images and their reuse in parody form, it is possible for agencies and politicians to consider what images they wish to 'put out there' to reduce the prospect of having their message overshadowed by a clever, funny or touching parody.

This means avoiding deliberately publishing images which are obvious fodder for parody - anything related to being 'on the phone', 'inspecting developments' or easily misinterpreted facial expressions.

It is also important to avoid 'follow the leader' shots - where an Australian official is photographed in a similar pose, or doing a similar thing, to an overseas official who was recently parodied for the same pose (such as the Cameron - Abbott situation).

I saw one of these images yesterday from an Australian politician and decided to see how easy it would be to modify it for use in parody.

Using my trusty copy of Seashore - a free graphics editing tool with many of the same features of Photoshop, I was able to cut out the relevant parts of the original image within about 15 minutes.

It then took a simple Google image search to locate some freely available images and a matter of second to import and place the politicians within the scenes.

Below I've included a copy of the original image (in its original tweet), as well as several of the 'photoshopped' parody images.

Consider this what is possible by a relatively inexperienced user of a free graphic design program in under an hour - then consider what someone with more experience and more intent could do with images that make parody easy.

The original Tweet (with a 'watching infrastructure' image - a type very likely to be parodied):

Watching the NBN rollout with @peterdutton_mp at Murrumba Downs in Peter's electorate of Dickson. pic.twitter.com/IEbDp1TcZ1
— Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm) August 11, 2014

My (very quickly) 'photoshopped' images - starting with my favourite:

Now think about how you want your Minister and staff portrayed, and how you can minimise the likelihood of your official images being reused for parody purposes.

While you can't prevent this from happening, prudent image selection and advice can, at least, minimise the potential and help you retain control of your message.

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Watch the video of the GovHack 2014 Red Carpet Awards

The GovHack Red Carpet Awards was awesome (as you can see from the liveblog from Sunday).

If you weren't able to attend or watch the event's livestream, the video of the awards is now live at the GovHack site, and I've embedded it below for your convenience.

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