What if we held an Australian broadband crisis and nobody came? That's pretty much what happened in Australian broadband policy over the decade to 2025. Governments, forecasters and the media can all learn lessons from this episode. Illustration: Fibre optic cable in a Telstra...

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Cross posted from Quillette from 16 Feb 2019, but now behind a paywall. When a conversation is not a conversation: party political discourse in the early 21st century I It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. The chaos of Donald Trump was unimaginable just a decade a...

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https://youtu.be/ftssK9b8WFI Finding a formatting mess when I looked this up on Troppo , I've reposted it here for the record. I'm a bit embarrassed by my wooden speaking style. Here’s the David Solomon Lecture I’ll be giving at the Brisbane Museum of Modern Art in an hour’s t...

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News Corp is telling us what Google should really pay for linking to its sites. It's telling us in code – HTML code. And the answer is ... $0.00. What is an Internet link worth to the linker? For most of the Internet's life, this question has been pointless. On the Internet, l...

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As part of the Government 2.0 Taskforce in 2009 I coined the term 'info-philanthropy' though someone may have coined it before me and the Taskforce proposed that it qualify as a head of philanthropy. I don't think any changes have been made, but there's reasonable scope to inc...

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[caption id="attachment_36337" align="alignleft" width="939"] Creating and managing a high-performance knowledge-sharing network: the Toyota case [/caption] I recently reposted my old column on blogging the 2008 crisis and there's been some great blogging of this crisis. What...

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Are you dismayed at getting 100 emails a day you need to wade through, disturbing your concentration? Does your administration bother you constantly with things you just ‘have to be aware of’? Are you tired of the ‘executive reports’, ‘award notices’, 'compulsory breathing tra...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo Lateral Economics has been commissioned by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to estimate the value of the Australian Census to the Australian community. As part of that exercise we've got the go-ahead from ABS to do something...

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In part 1, I looked at whether it made sense to have random individuals inserted into parliament, or to let policies be decided by juries full of randomly chosen individuals. Both were argued to be unworkable and likely to lead to more corruption, rather than less: policies th...

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I'm pleased to see Jason Potts tweeting "Blogs are still a thing. This one I just came across is the thingest. It's like @slatestarcodex, but for econ & tech artir.wordpress.com". As a result of tweeting back my 2009 post on Blogging the crisis , I re-read it. Sometimes I'm su...

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Part Two of my essay on the way of looking at the world I've worked out over the last few years and published on Evonomics can be found here . So many years, so few words :( Part one of this essay showed how two dimensions of free riding define what we call “public goods” – th...

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Below the introduction to a piece in The Mandarin today . We shoot the breeze about who’ll win the next election or footy match. Virtually none of it helps predict the future. But we’re driven on … as if somehow it will. We do it with the economy. People ask economists how the...

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Last week I participated in a panel discussion that kicked off Melbourne Knowledge Week. MKW is a Good Thing that has been running for a few years. It was initiated by Melbourne City Council against the background thought that knowledge is becoming progressively more important...

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Just a note to record the fact that blogging is 20 years old this month, maybe. New media legend Dave Winer, a rare combination of great writer and programmer, started posting at DaveNet on 7 October 1994 , as Philip Greenspun points out. There was no announcement that Winer h...

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Below the fold is the Ockham's Razor lecture that went to air yesterday. Since the trolls have already come out in force on the ABC thread (The ABC's illustration doesn't help!), I've reproduced it for your delectation below. Nicholas Gruen: Both popular commonsense and econom...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz1XBcWI6LM Above is my presentation to the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society - the background blurb of which is here . You'll find the first half of the presentation on the fractal ecology of public and private goods is effectively the sa...

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Prologue to a blog post: Gentle Troppodillians, as you know, we keep up with the times here at Troppo. Some people like to think just five minutes ahead. Here at Troppo we're focused on the long-term - eons are seconds in TroppoTime - or seconds are eons depending on the way y...

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I'm a fan of Angel-list and have invested in two companies already over the platform (as trustee for Club Troppo's 4.7 billion self-managed super fund). Here's the disclaimer which you verify before you get to invest. I like it, though even here I'd rather just one or two clea...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="406"] Emotiv Insight & Google Glass on Emotiv CTO, Dr Geoffrey Mackellar.[/caption]

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Here are some headlines marking various milestones of progress and regress in the Government 2.0 agenda. As we recommended in the Cutler Report donations to the global commons are growing apace. Meanwhile it's not surprising that the Scandinavians, who are some of the most imp...

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The sight of the raw institutional dysfunction in the US government at the moment provides a useful reminder to Australians that we should both treasure and encourage the respect that Australians have for our federal government institutions. By "government institutions", I'm p...

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Felix Barbalet is a data scientist and economist working in Canberra who has recently launched http://www.APSindex.com and https://www.APSjobs.info . He is a good fellow and on discussing his new websites with him, I suggested that he give us a post about the remarkable produc...

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I'm doing some research for a talk I'm giving in New Zealand to heads of private schools - the invitation for which came from a similar talk I gave to the Australian Heads of Independent Schools Association. I'm sruiking the wonders of education 2.0 about which I've waxed and...

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Today's column in the Age and SMH Public private partnerships (PPPs) haven't been such a happy experiment. Using private money to build arterial roads just increases their cost because private capital requires much higher returns than government borrowing. But I've long wonder...

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In physics we're used to the idea that at different scales and at different stages of some process, very different things happen. We inhabit Newton's world of medium sized things and speeds - planets, trees, footballs and travel at walking, driving or flying speed - even space...

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I've been talking about this kind of stuff for a fair while in presentations and intimated similar things in some longer pieces and a column or two on Adam Smith and Web 2.0, but I've not done a column on Web 2.0 as public goods privately built. But I have now . THERE'S a revo...

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My daughter alerted me to this very cute video of little kids in the US and their comprehension of the election. "There's the 'white house' and the 'black house'. . . " It's worth watching just for a bit of diversion. But I couldn't embed it so have just copied a still from it...

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Interesting piece by well-known IT figure Jeff Atwood: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/09/computer-crime-then-and-now.html On one level, this piece is a terrific summary of how hacking is done. It's mostly not about messing with computers; it's about messing with people....

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Herewith the column of two reports for the Australian Digital Alliance on copyright exceptions. Sounds abstruse but it's quite engaging methinks. On December 17, 1903, after years of tinkering with his brother Wilbur, Orville Wright took to the skies at Kitty Hawk, North Carol...

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Some readers may remember this blog post . Here's an update from today's Age/ SMH column. IN 2010 the energetic and forward-looking (then) secretary of Victoria's Education Department invited me to discuss educational innovation and Web 2.0 with senior departmental managers. W...

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http://youtu.be/PUSdjfh2YjM

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Today's column is pretty self-explanatory. I would have liked to say a fair bit more about the system and how it works, but there's a haiku like pleasure in getting it down to 800 words (OK well, that's not haiku, but you get my meaning). Here it is: I FIRST came upon the rema...

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http://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE Steve is all the rage. Run your company like Steve Jobs. Do nuclear physics like Einstein. I doubt anyone should try to run their company like Steve Jobs. But that doesn't stop it being interesting to listen to things he says. In any event, I ran in...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKkgcKoPa9I&feature=channel&list=UL I've been having to go further and further in the world to get anyone to listen to me. But in any event, I enjoyed this breakfast radio interview in Regina Saskatchewan.

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A few months ago, Sam Roggeveen from the Lowy Institute asked me to talk at a function the Institute was holding on secrecy. I said I wasn't particularly well qualified to talk directly on secrecy regarding national security and foreign affairs, but I was happy to speak about...

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We are all in Tom Watson's debt for pursuing the corruption of the Murdoch press as vigorously as he has - and continues to. I have had some dealings with Tom arising from my involvement in the Government 2.0 Taskforce. In any event, in addition to continuing his pursuit of th...

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http://youtu.be/YQIMGV5vtd4

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http://youtu.be/x7M47ITv8iQ One thing I think about whenever I sit in a tram waiting for cars that shouldn't be holding up the tram to stop holding up the tram is that trams should have a video cam on them and drivers could have a button that either activates the cam or marks...

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I've been counting those I know who are highly energetic, positive people and who are naturally excited by the possibilities of the web, who have been leaving government employ. I can think of Darren Whitelaw in Victoria, Mia Garlick in the Commonwealth service (though based i...

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[slideshare id=4858111&doc=ourfuturelibrary3-100728100555-phpapp02] Tim O'Reilly proposed the slogan "Government as a platform" for his Government 2.0 activities which he's heavily scaled back in favour of more lucrative opportunities. But there was always a problem. That prob...

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I've always thought that institutions that are set up at arms length from government to offer independent advice to governments would be an excellent venue for online discussions to start taking place. An easy opportunity, pretty comprehensively passed up was the Public Servic...

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When I did the Government 2.0 Taskforce, one of the subjects that was earnestly discussed was archiving of government sites. It's a big problem in government. I could never see why it should be a big problem. After all you can look at anything written on ClubTroppo since it st...

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Ross Gittins asked me if I'd fill in for him during his summer break, which gives me a chance to get a few things off my chest. So here's the first of four weekly columns. In 2009, I chaired the federal government's Government 2.0 Taskforce. We sketched out how government migh...

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Herewith a paper about my encounter with design, on taking up the Chairmanship of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and encountering the Family by Family program. The site where it's been published has no comments facility, so I'm opening up discussion here should an...

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Here are two talks I've given in the last year. One was a couple of weeks ago at a Melbourne Conversation on Big Data . I talk about the serendipity of big data and the relevance for privacy regulation. And tell a story about Kaggle. I recommend the talk before mine by David M...

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[Cross-posted to Online Opinion ] I spend my working life running an online media firm - WorkDay Media, publisher of Banking Day - with its owner and editor-in-chief, Ian Rogers. Last month, Ian and I wrote a submission to the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry. Yo...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PoD84TVdD-4 I know you're all on the edges of your seats about how Kaggle is going. The answer is "very well". We've just announced the closure of Series A funding. And you can read all about it in the New York Times , the...

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Human beings only play when they are in the full sense of the word human and they are only fully human when they play. Friedrich Shiller Games seem frivolous. They can stand as metaphors for life, but typically, the outcome of games doesn't really matter. I wanted Collingwood...

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Reading Tim Harford's excellent Adapt: Why success always starts with failure an idea occurred to me. He talks of the curse of the playpump - a photogenic aid strategy that appeals to celebrities and millionaires but which doesn't work. It's obvious that information about what...

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Here's the David Solomon Lecture I'll be giving at the Brisbane Museum of Modern Art in an hour's time. I Whether or not I can speak with sufficient insight to be worthy of giving the David Solomon lecture, I possess at least one qualification. I have known David for over thir...

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I'm doing a few presentations in the next week or so and have been hit by an avalanche of bureaucracy. I try to minimise costs for my clients and book the cheapest airfares possible (usually booking them late in the piece to preserve some flexibility). One of my government cli...

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Well the ABC God bless its cotton socks can't quite bring itself to mount videos that can be embedded elsewhere - or I can't see a way to do it, but they did a great story on Kaggle tonight - so I thought I'd post it here. Just click here and all will be revealed. Update: some...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsLBuCp23QA&feature=player_embedded

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For more - here .

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I never fully understood Google Health . It seems to be a consumer product, inviting you to input your data and track your health, set health goals and so on. Certainly there could be some benefits in this and in the aggregation of information, but the amount of effort maintai...

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Well blow me down! In early 2009 I was invited to Beijing to participate in a 'dialogue' on 'the knowledge society' which was being run between various academic institutions in Australia and Peking University. The 'dialogue' was quite formal and diplomatic - I recognised the g...

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This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in, do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner, it can suck anything. Any useless person; any liar; any drunkard; anyone under the influence; anyone high on drugs; can talk on the Interne...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="640" caption="Cartoon purloined following Patrick's excellent advice @ comment 8. "] [/caption] As I've said at least once before, my own approach to economics could be described as looking for $100 bills on the pavement. I think they'r...

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A very reasonable request - so it seems to me - from Dave Bath who has asked me to post the guest post below. I guess there's a message there - not just for Auditors General but for all right thinking government agencies. It's bleg time... for people who'd like to get all Audi...

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It always struck me how inefficient universities were with most efforts going into lectures which were inherently a broadcast medium - so much so you could go and get the tapes of the lectures. Meanwhile, tutes were usually a bit of an afterthought and a place where grad stude...

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I recently posted about the Christchurch earthquake and the way in which Crisis Commons was able to help. Here's an email exchange from someone in the crisis centre working on the government side with Tim McNamara who was doing a lot of the organising on the Crisis Commons sid...

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In the conference I attended in Wellington NZ I saw a presentation by Tim McNamara a Wellington developer who spearheaded what seemed like a very successful volunteer web 2.0 effort that arose in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake. Using Ushahidi an open source package in...

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I've just finished a bit of a barnstorm tour of New Zealand giving two presentations with a similar title to that above and a talk on Govt 2.0 which funded the visit. I must say I've loved it. Having checked out Auckland and Wellington for the first time in forty years, I can...

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Saul Eslake asked a bunch of people for comments on the recent Grattan Institute study of productivity and I sent him back a long email which I reproduce with some editing here. Nothing very surprising for people who are regular visitors here, but perhaps worth posting in case...

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It's a high res picture if you want to download it and read the detail - which is fascinating.

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So now we have to take it seriously! Well I doubt any study can prove something like that, but there you go. Causation could go in both directions, but either way, we told you so . Public policy, trust and growth: disclosure of government information in Japan. Date: 2010-12-20...

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During the Government 2.0 inquiry a Web 2.0 enthusiast in the Qld police force wrote me an email suggesting that life wasn't easy for web 2.0 inside his agency. I stayed in touch but wasn't really able to do much other than encourage in various ways. Anyway, he says that thing...

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Occasionally a report comes along which should give people a whole new way of looking at a public policy debate. A new report on universal high-speed broadband (UHSB) via fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), titled "Superfast: Is It Really Worth a Subsidy?" , does just that. Written...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfFMIhMEyYY&feature=player_profilepage I was pleased to be asked to speak at the Queensland's Right Information Day. In my speech I wanted to speak a little against the grain. The language used by Web 2.0, Gov 2.0 aficionados has a particular qua...

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Previously on this blog I've outlined a couple of themes of mine about Government 2.0. In a comment on a draft APS Social Manifesto I elaborated on both things and so I thought I'd reproduce them here. I think what you’re trying to do is worthwhile. However culture change is a...

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A few people have sent me requests to recommend them on Linkedin but I've not really known what to say - recommend to whom? But perhaps the secret source was flattery, which as Disraeli once said should be laid on with a trowel. Whatever it was, I got this overgenerous recomme...

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http://vimeo.com/15978330

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This post is what I would have written as a comment on Nicholas’s post Listen2Learners: 1 but it got a bit big. So is this post. The following lines of his post sparked my attention I impressed upon Peter the extent to which the online world of web 2.0 is one in which people a...

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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is something I'd like to do some more work in. I haven't because I've not been able to get a consulting gig for Lateral Economics on the subject (hint, hint, if you know anyone who wants some consultant to go boldly where no consultant has...

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A while back I was rung up and interviewed by a student doing a thesis on Government 2.0. She asked lots of good questions and they brought out in me a bunch of things I've been thinking about regarding Government 2.0. Since she sent me a transcript, I thought it may be useful...

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Yes folks as part of our relentless drive to leverage our world class infrastructure and skills to bring our readers to their personal delight point - and beyond, Subho Banerjee of PM&C emailed me (amongst others to tell me of the opportunities below). He assured me that anyon...

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Looks like a technical detail but what it signifies is of huge consequence - the further development of the division of (intellectual) labour. May Amazon's tail continue to thicken! The Longer Tail: The Changing Shape of Amazon’s Sales Distribution Curve Erik Brynjolfsson Mass...

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A while ago, I was rung by Richard Letts of the Music Council of Australia , a kind of peak body of music organisations asking - to my amazement - if I would give the Annual address at their annual conference. Robyn Homes of the National Library of Australia had seen me speak...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqrr6Aiaqlk&feature=youtu.be Here's my presentation at the O'Reilly Government 2.0 Summit last week. And a copy edited transcript is below the fold. Good afternoon everyone! I’m going to talk to you about public goods. Informally we all have the...

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If you look at this presentation I gave just after releasing the draft report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, you'll see me (at around the seventh minute) talking about how Web 2.0 turbocharges the ecology of reputation. As I did in this column of mine (one of my best IMO) I...

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The regulation requiring medicines to be sold with consumer product information guides is a good idea in principle. But in the attempt to find out a little more about an over-the-counter pill I sometimes take to get to sleep - Restavit - I found myself reading one. It's got so...

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One of the drivers of our modern world is the way in which public and private interest are being reconfigured. In many ways it's analogous to the rise of science. As Paul David’s history of the emergence of open science argues, the precondition for ‘take-off’ in modern science...

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I was asked at a Departmental seminar today whether the eleciton of a Coalition Government would set back Government 2.0. I said I didn't know, but that even if it did not have as much support from an incoming government as it has had in this term, the main tasks ahead of us w...

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I've just looked at the top four apps on Victoria's AppMyState comp - the winners were announced tonight - and they're marvellous. Really natty, fresh and (it seems well done, though I've not put them through any very rigorous testing.) What's happening here is something a lit...

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This is a quick post, I'd like to make it longer but won't have the time. It's worked up from a comment on a post by Kate Lundy which articulates why e-literacy of various kinds should be part of the national curriculum. Couldn't agree more. But a couple of things occur to me....

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My last post on the UK and the third way began with this sentence. What do you do if you’re a ‘third wayer’ and things don’t seem to be turning out all that flatteringly for your vision? You just keep talking in pretty much the same way, slap a coat of Web 2.0 paint on the vis...

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One of the great benefits of Web 2.0 is the way in which it facilitates collaboration and information exchange in all manner of ways. And one of the upshots of this is that it improves the market for reputation. It does so by speeding up the process itself - so people who have...

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For some time now I've been arguing that we should do for information what we did for competition in the 1990s - adopt a national information policy in the image of national competition policy. National competition policy was a trawl through our economic institutions presuming...

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I participated in an enjoyable discussion on open government on Late Night Live last night . If one has been thinking about things for a long time and wants to get certain ideas across, it can be pretty challenging doing this effectively - which is to say without misunderstand...

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Herewith a column of mine for Government News arguing that with Government 2.0 'open government' is making the transition from being essentially an agenda of constitutional hygiene and civil rights (perhaps regarded as an economic luxury) to being a micro-economic reform issue...

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As I travel the country preaching the great things about Web 2.0 it's great to see a really interesting Web 2.0 app being launched from sunny Melbourne. Well actually I guess it was launched while its creator was living in Sydney but he's just moved down to Melbourne where he...

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One thing I've been at pains to stress is that Web 2.0 platforms - like Wikipedia, Blogger, Google Search, Google Calendar, Facebook - are public goods. Further, although a core function of government is to build public goods, none of these public goods were built by governmen...

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Down here in Victoria (well I'm not there right now but will return in late Jan) things have turned nasty as the Indian Government keeps pointing out when we kill another Indian. I'm not as concerned as some other people as to whether it's racially based violence. It's violenc...

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[caption id="attachment_34760" align="alignright" width="415"] Julie Hempenstall from Bendigo[/caption] Here's today's column in the SMH which was slightly edited back from the original. Who is Julie Hempenstall? She lives in Bendigo and she likes reading Australia's historic...

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Here's yesterday's column in the Financial Review coinciding with the release of the Draft Report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce. The Fin's headline was "Web and open government a way to a better world". The expression Web 2.0 connotes the internet as a platform for collabora...

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My local council, Port Phillip is holding a competition for young people to name this dragon which has just been built in a playground. If you're any of the 0-17 kids reading this site you probably have some 'issues' but perhaps you can show it to your kids. If you get your en...

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For economists and other social scientists who read this blog but don't pop over to the Government 2.0 Taskforce website, you should - there's m oney to be made serving the public interest - never a bad thing.

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Cross posted from www.gov2.net.au At a roundtable in Sydney, Miriam Lyons of the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) mentioned the idea of inquiries 2.0. As I said to her at the roundtable, Ive been giving a fair bit of thought to that question myself. Having spent some time o...

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