Storify from the Innovation Month event "Google Glass as a certain reality"

This morning I attended the Innovation Month event "Google Glass as a certain reality", hosted by the Department of Education.

It was a great event, and extremely well attended (well over 100 people in the audience), featuring very engaging talks from Alexander Hayes, Matthew Purcell and seven of his students from Canberra Grammer School.

The Twitter back channel was highly engaging, and I created the Storify below from the conversation.

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Minister Turnbull launches brilliant #opendata National Map of Australia - plugs GovHack 2014

Yesterday Minister Turnbull announced the launch of the NationalMap beta - a project jointly developed by the Department of Communications and NICTA to create a single authoritative geographic view of Australia from an open data perspective.

The Minister said the Map was "part of the Government’s commitment to increasing the number of publicly available datasets."

The NationalMap beta, available at nationalmap.nicta.com.au, aggregates datasets from Geoscience Australia, the Department of Meteorology, the Department of Communication, Australian Bureau of Statistics and a host of other agencies via data.gov.au.

Ranging from topographic features to transportation networks and infrastructure to statistical boundaries (including the ABS's new mesh blocks), all of the datasets are available as open data and can be individually downloaded from within the map interface using their respective 'info' links.

There's also a link to 'Add data' to the Map, which I presume allows a user to upload custom data sets to display, although I could not get this to work.

The NationalMap is built on an open source stack of technologies, including Geoserver, Cesium and Leaflet. NICTA are contributing to these projects where relevant to help improve their capabilities.

In my view the site looks great.

I like the fisheye lens 3D approach used by default, and this can be easily switched to 2D if people prefer. The navigational controls are standard for online maps and the interface is simple to use, though a lack of visible labels means users have to mouseover each icon individually to find out what they do.

The NationalMap did load and update slowly when I used it, particularly as more layers of data were added. Given this is a beta, and presumably hosted on a lower end server with limited bandwidth, this was neither surprising nor a major problem.

Overall I think the NationalMap beta is a great step forward for Australia and provides a rich source of reusable open data for GovHack this weekend.

Hopefully this is only a taste of the projects the Coalition government is championing within government as there's tremendous value to be found in open data, if agencies receive a clear mandate to release it for reuse.

There are so many opportunities right now to use Gov 2.0 approaches to empower businesses and communities to more proactively engage in government policy development, service delivery and self-management. If the government can realise these with a clear and mandated agenda, Australia will be in a strong economic position for years to come.

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Overview of the Breaking Patterns Public Sector Innovation Summit

For anyone who didn't attend the Breaking Patterns Innovation Summit on Tuesday 8 July 2014 (which includes me), Oakley Kwon (@OakleyKwon) has compiled a fantastic Storify of the day capturing many of the key ideas and insights.

Shared below, it's worth five minutes of your time.

Also keep an eye out for the other great events throughout Innovation week.

The next one is tomorrow, Google Glass as a certain reality in education

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Having a dinosaur in your corner really helps with public sector innovation

It's quite common for those of us on the pointy end of Government 2.0, innovation, agile and open source/open data and similar 'progressive' thinking to refer to people who seem reluctant and risk-averse as 'dinosaurs'.

The terminology crosses the government/corporate divide - indeed I'm hearing it now more often in reference to senior management in large Australian companies than in government agencies.

Sometimes it's used as a term of affection, sometimes in derision - but there's always the implication that the designated 'dinosaur' is out-of-touch, missing opportunities and holding back their organisation.

However if you take a step back and think about it a little more, many supposed 'dinosaurs' are actually quite progressive in their thinking and activities. They may simply have a different role in the workplace, with different workplace priorities and key performance indicators.

Or they may simply be a product of different life experiences - grown up in an age when media was less complex and the internet was limited to academic institutions.

Sometimes all the 'dinosaurs' need to transform their thinking is a clear business case couched in terms they understand, or a life experience which makes them realise the world has changed.

Indeed I can think of one extremely senior Australian public servant who transformed their thinking after observing how their children used Facebook to organise a successful family gathering - realising social media wasn't just about sharing lunch images, but had real value as a tool for marshalling support and spreading information.

Other 'dinosaurs', however, can be destructive - holding back their organisations to the point where they miss large opportunities or damage organisational reputation and brand. I've seen this numerous times - to the extent where Ministers have been harmed by the decisions of senior public servants.

There's also a group of supposed 'dinosaurs' that aren't dinosaurs at all. They're impersonating dinosaurs for role or camouflage reasons - people who prefer to influence from inside a group, rather than from the outside.

So how can progressive thinkers ('mammals'?) help to tell which dinosaurs are which? How can they help dinosaurs evolve?

One particular strategy that helps is to have a dinosaur on your side - preferably a large one with substantial presence and influence.

If you can identify someone who is simply wearing a dinosaur suit for workplace purposes, rather than being a true dyed-in-the-scale dinosaur, you've got a significant opportunity to enlist that person to begin influencing from within. Provided that person is seen as another dinosaur (albeit a slightly unusual one), they can often significantly influence an organisation's agenda as a champion for innovation, open data, or whatever the progressive workplace cause might be.

Alternatively if you can find a dinosaur who is purely driven by their role or KPIs, identify how to match your business case for moving forward with their workplace goals. if you can align a progressive approach with their priorities you will find they quickly shift their position - even take ownership of the idea - as they can see the benefit in personal and professional terms.

However if you find that all your dinosaurs are true dinosaurs - unable and unwilling to change, even when the business case is strong - consider your options.

You could bring in supposed dinosaurs from other organisations that they trust and respect, to show them the error of their ways.

You could wait for an extinction event, their retirement, replacement or, unfortunately, a serious event which proves their decisions were wrong.

Or you can seek a new habitat - changing roles or workplaces to find one where there is more room for change.

Just always keep in mind that not all dinosaurs are really dinosaurs (just as not everyone claiming to be a progressive workplace thinker is one), indeed many think themselves quite progressive.

And keep in mind that having your own dinosaur in the corner is far more effective than simply throwing stones.

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The importance for government of respecting open source and open data copyrights

An interesting situation has arisen in Italy, with the country's Agenzia delle Entrate, the Italian revenue service and taxation authority, accused of copying OpenStreetMap without respecting the site's copyright license.

As documented on the Open Street Maps discussion list, Italy's OpenStreetMap community discovered a little over three months ago that the maps used by the Agenzia delle Entrate in the website of the Italian Observatory of the Estate Market (housing market site) closely resembled those from OpenStreetMap.

In fact, they were able to establish that the Agenzia delle Entrate had copied data from OpenStreetMaps, then superimposed other data on top.

Now given OpenStreetMaps is an open source project, crowdsourcing the streetmaps of the world, that shouldn't normally be a problem.

OpenStreetMaps' data is freely available to copy and reuse - that's the entire point of it.

However there was one factor that the Agenzia delle Entrate had ignored. That the copyright license to freely reuse OpenStreetMap data came with one condition - to credit the source.

Using a Creative Commons by Attribution license, which is also the default copyright for Australian Government information, OpenStreetMaps required only one thing of organisations and individuals reusing their data - to provide an attribution back to the source.

This the Agenzia delle Entrate had failed to do.

OK - this isn't a big issue, and the folk in Italy's OpenStreetMap community weren't that worried to start with. They simply emailed the agency to ask it to correct this omission.

No reply.

Three months later - with no formal response from the agency, and no rectification of the copyright on the site, the OpenStreetMap folk stepped up their criticism.

They created a website where Italians and others can view and compare OpenStreetMap with the Agenzia delle Entrate's site to see how the Italian government agency has violated copyright for themselves.

You can view the website here: http://agenziauscite.openstreetmap.it/

It's in Italian (naturally), so if you don't read the language an online translation tool can help, but isn't required to compare the maps.

I suggest that visitors use the search tool in the left-hand map to find 'Milan', which is the city recommended for comparison purposes. Note that the agency took its copy of OpenStreetMap a few months ago, so is not as up-to-date as OpenStreetMap itself.


The situation has grown from a simple omission into an active campaign, not only because the government agency ignored the community concerned, but also because that community now feels that if the government is prepared to ignore copyright requirements so blatantly, how is any other copyright in Italy safe.

Essentially if a government agency won't do the right thing when reusing intellectual property, why should businesses or individuals trust them - or do the right thing themselves.

It's something that every government agency should ponder.

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