Twenty Ten!

So, as promised here is some detail on the issues that I think will be getting attention from me in 2010. 

A few of the items on the list continue from last year, and there are a couple of obvious new ones.

Gov20. This has been a major focus area in Australia and New Zealand over the last twelve months and a great deal of progress has been made. This coming year needs to be a year that sees implementation of many of the Gov20 ideas and proposals. There were some grand and exciting plans discussed during 2009 and it would be great to see them become reality.

Increased focus on the semantic web. I hear you yawning already, but I think that some of the spill over topics from the Gov20 conversation (massive amounts of published government data for example) coupled with advancing semantic search tools, along with semantic tools appearing in products like Bing, have the potential to give this topic a push.

Government Interoperability Frameworks. In a post from March of last year I suggested that it was time for governments to begin to rethink the way that their interoperability frameworks are written. Many of them have devolved into little more than a list of standards, delivering very little by way of interoperability between government systems and people. I’m already seeing some of the Australian state governments taking a more scenario based approach to interoperability, along with work from organizations like CSTransform offering new ideas around government interoperability policy.

The move to IPv6. The move is not going to happen in 2010, but by all accounts the date when we will see IPv4 address space exhausted is getting closer. Couple that with IPv6 dependant features creeping into several market available operating systems and I would expect to be involved in more discussions around IPv6 in 2010 than in previous years.

National broadband networks. Each of the respective national broadband networks in Australia and New Zealand has the potential to have a significant impact on the way that we think about, build and implement software standards. Organizations like the Institute for a Broadband Enabled Society (IBES) at Melbourne University are starting to think about use scenarios for these networks and in 2010 I would expect to see a similar organization form in one of New Zealand’s Universities.

The future role of IT standards. This might sound like an odd one. Standardization as we know it today is a long and arduous process, but for many good reasons. Developing an ISO level standard involves process to consult over one hundred nations at a national level and will sometimes involve many hundreds of contributors and reviewers. As Web20 technologies play a bigger role in government systems delivery I’m expecting to participate in conversations about how we speed up the standards development process to accommodate rapidly changing public API and data definitions. (think Twitter and Facebook).

Technology to enable standards development. This final point involves a project that myself and a handful of colleagues have been discussing lately. If we’re going to see broad participation in the standards development process, for IT or other markets, we need to think about ways of reducing the cost and complexity of involvement. Technology itself potentially has a role to play here if we can find low cost ways of enabling cross group collaboration for any standards development community. More on this later…