Film screening - EveryOne, EveryWhere, EveryWhen

Greetings from the world premier of "EveryOne, EveryWhere, EveryWhen". This film discusses the environmental and social effects of water use in Australian rivers. As it happens, I took part in a tour of the Baaka, one of the rivers featured, & met Dobby, who is now on the panel discussion.

Sustainable energy Planning for Indigenous Communities

Greetings from the Australian National University where Professor Paul Parker, University of Waterloo is speaking on "Sustainable energy planning in Canada: recognising diversity and the need for Indigenous voices". There are significant lessons for providing energy to remote Australian communities, in terms of consulting the local community on what they need. Surprisingly, solar energy is viable in Canada, along with wind. I asked Professor Parker about the role of for-profit companies in alternative energy, as most of the examples given were government funded not-for-profit initiatives. The problem is that these are limited by the availability of public finding. I suggest some training in startups for those involved may be useful, so they can seek out what the customer is will to pay for, so they can be self funding.

One of the audience asked about portable energy systems for  Australasian abourginal communities. I pointed out that ECLIPS Engineering built a Container Roll-Out Solar System (CROSS) for the Australian military. This is a very rugged system of standard solar panels attached to a hinged framework mounted on a shipping container compatible platform. It would be able to provide power for a small town. Smaller versions could be built for family groups, which could be packed into a trailer and towed behind a car.

Australian Government Open Data Repository Focusing on Real Data

Greetings from  the "Big data, big opportunity" conference, at the Australian National University in Canberra, where Pia Waugh, Director of Coordination and Gov 2.0, Australian Government is explaining the open data strategy. She emphasized that real data for data.gov.au is needed, not electronic copies of government documents. A good example is that the budget data was provided as computer readable files, as well as human readable documents. Not all government data can be made public as it contains confidential information about people and organizations. I noticed Pia is the only one of the presenters talking about information access how actually has a computer in front of them.

ps: Recently the Australian Prime Minister said "Coal is good for humanity ...", perhaps we can get Malcolm Turnbull , Minister for Communications to say: "Data is good for humanity, data is good for prosperity, data is an essential part of our economic future, here in Australia, and right around the world". ;-)

Climate Governance

Greetings from  the "Big data, big opportunity" conference, at the Australian National University in Canberra, where Eliza Murray is speaking on "Could order and ambition emerge from the fragmented climate governance complex?". She is using network analysis and demonstrated this using Gephi software. The idea is to look at the connections between national and international institutions involved with climate change. She estimates there are about 1,000 institutions to research, which therefore requires automated analysis. She intends to mine the website of climate change organizations and look at the overlapping memberships. She expects to find that the organizations have become decentralized by not fragmented.

Eliza commented that she initially stated her research on Australian organizations, but found these were not indicative of the international situation. When interviewing people in other countries she is asked "Why are these weird things going on in Australia with climate change?

I suggested Eliza contact Paul Thomas and the people at CSIRO researching information retrieval.

Citizen Mapping in Indonesia

Greetings from  the "Big data, big opportunity" conference, at the Australian National University in Canberra, where Christina Griffin is speaking on "Open access spatial data for effective disaster risk reduction". She is emphasizing the use of open street map for dealing with disasters in developing nations. While crowd sourced mapping data has limitations, it is better than no data at all. She is studying vulnerability to disasters in central Java, Indonesia. It happens I helped with the deployment of Sahana open source software for the 2006 Yogjakarta Earthquake in Indonesia.