The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
The NSW Government has begun a long process of cataloguing all the data sets it collects and has now committed to making the free public availability of each set its default position in handling public information.
The Department of Premier and Cabinet has created a website at
data.nsw.gov.au to list all government data sets, outlining which sets
are freely available and a timetable for those that are not yet
available.
The site will be populated as the State completes its roadmap for
implementing better information practices in the wake of the ‘NSW
Sphere’ Gov 2.0 event – an event organised by Parliamentary Secretary
Penny Sharpe and based on the similar events contructed by ACT Senator
Kate Lundy.
And the roadmap, which overhauls how data is collected, stored and made
available, is being conducted in conjunction with a $100,000
competition called ‘Apps4NSW’ aimed at encouraging the public to come
up with ideas for new applications using government data, or prototypes
for new applications.
Rees has attached himself directly to the Apps4NSW and data.nsw
developments, with policy development for the 2.0 roadmap being
developed directly through the Department of Premier and Cabinet.
It took a single iPhone application that let users look up the suburban
rail timetable to overturn decades of entrenched thinking and drive the
NSW Government toward the possibilities of Gov 2.0 technologies.
After the developer of the application found himself being threatened
with legal action by RailCorp for using timetable data, Rees intervened
with Transport Minister David Campbell.
"We couldn’t find any reason to withhold the data, especially given
that RailCorp doesn’t offer an equivalent service," Rees said, adding
that the timetable information would be free to anyone from next week.
Meanwhile, Gov 2.0 Taskforce member and Broadband, Communications and
the Digital Economy departmental assistant secretary Mia Garlick will
join Senator Lundy as a speaker at the Gov 2.0 Conference being
organised by event firm CeBIT in Canberra on October 19.
Other speakers include New York State’s chief information officer Dr
Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, and the director of the UK Hansard Society’s
eDemocracy Program Dr Andy Williamson.
David Bass
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