The street as a platform, what's government's role?

An extremely thought-provoking post about The street as platform written by Dan Hill in February 2008 has been brought to my attention by Darren Sharp.

The post explores the virtual life of a city street, all the digital data exchanging hands between systems, infrastructure, vehicles and people in the street unseen to human eyes.

While condensed into a single street, the post is based entirely on current technologies and practices. It could easily represent a real street in any major city anywhere in the world today.

The question for me is what is government's role in building the infrastructure, managing and effectively using the data collected?

Streets are generally infrastructure created and maintained by governments and the systems that 'power' a street are often installed and managed by public concerns (roads and pavements, water, sewage, electricity and telecommunications) or at least guided by government planning processes (the nature of the dwellings and commercial services provided on the street). So there's clearly a significant role for government in the virtual aspects of streets as well.

There has been some work done internationally on what precisely is the role of government (some articles and publications listed at the Victorian Government's eGovernment Resource Centre, but have we done enough here in Australia?

Given we have a national broadband network planned, and are already in the process of preparing for pilot roll outs, ensuring that this enables, rather than limits the vision of our digital streets in a managed and well-thought out manner is clearly moving its way up the priority list.