BarCamp Canberra 2 outcomes

Last Saturday the second BarCamp Canberra was held, featuring 25 presentations on an assortment of online focused topics, both ICT and business related.

With roughly 75 attendees, including the first Member of Parliament to attend an Australian BarCamp, Senator Kate Lundy (who is also on Twitter as @katelundy), the themes for the day focused on developing the online channel in government and emergency management.

On the emergency front, Pamela Fox (mash-up queen) provided an excellent insider's view of how Google developed and managed the maps of Victorian bushfires, and also provided access to her whitepaper on how government could further assist the public by making mapping data available alongside emergency RSS feeds. Side benefits she highlighted included less load on government web servers, improving reliability in high usage periods, greater capacity for the public to make use of emergency information and lower-cost more efficient information distribution and discovery.

Tom Worthington's presentation on how to get bushfire emergency authorities to work together was also very insightful, providing an understanding of how far Australia is from a nationally consistent system (very useful for emergencies that cross state borders).

James Dellow provided an excellent view on the progress of egovernment (gov 2.0) in the UK, and his slides are available online.

The Twitter feed for the day was immensely popular, trending as the 3rd top discussion at times through the day. It can be viewed at #bcc2.

Some other posts about the day are visible at:
Tom Worthington's blog
Ruth Ellison's blog

A selection of photos from the day are visible here and here.