Well the Summit is over and we have ideas about WHAT needs to be done. Now the challenge is HOW to go about it. Most of the pieces are in place, but scattered all around. So let me point at the two of the most obvious pieces.
The first is the initiative by edna - education network Australia. It’s called me.edu.au. http://me.edu.au/
This IS the basis of a citizen’s learning account. It’s still in beta and edna will probably not have considered its wider application. But with a little encouragement it could provide a way for every citizen to have a log in to many interactive .edu.au and gov.au services. It just starts as a log in to edna's network.
The second is a piece of software that could, with a little work, act as a good learning environment- i.e. the online forums. This Aussie invention is used as a courseware host in many .edu institutions around the world. With a little tweaking it could provide a good introduction to a citizen’s online learning. More importantly it will encourage teachers and students to get involved and learn it while communicating. It’s called a Moodle. http://moodle.org/sites/
Most of the things we would all like to see For Australia in 2020, and the infrastructure that it will demand, are now down to how fast people government departments might pick up the interactive and open culture. Wikipedia is the best example. 15 people are responsible for a network of information, which is contributed to, and demanded by, around 40 million people per month (take all numbers with a pound of salt). Progress needn’t be as daunting as you might think. Australia has a lot of very bright people here who would like to contribute, if we could just get conversations like this onto a well organised group of forums and help them find one another.
This can be done very quickly, as many of them would like to get involved but have never been given the means or opportunity. Thank you for the Summit; you’ve set the old media stage. Now the new interactive one must be set. So could I ask you to respond to this little message as though I, like many others, have been working for years on understanding how lots of the pieces and people could come together ? (once we had a government with the right attitudes).
Thankfully, now we have a government with the right attitudes.