The New Zealand Privacy Commissioner’s site outlines a number of things you can do to support the activities of the week;

• support/promote an event organised or hosted by another agency or host your own event in your town
• highlight your own privacy work by, for example, putting out guidance information; or
• publish guidance information for those using or working with cloud platforms;
• do a supportive media release;
• invite any speakers you may have visiting at the time who could talk about privacy, to do a public or invitation-based seminar or workshop

With this in mind a colleague in our Auckland office has compiled a comprehensive list of thing should be thinking about as you use Microsoft’s products. In the post he outlines some simple steps you can take to protect your privacy in each of the following categories;

• Your Personal Computer
• Your Web Browser
• Your Wireless Home Network
• Your Personal Internet “Cloud”
• Your Toys and Gadgets

The whole post can be found by clicking on this link.

The second speaker that IMM is announcing is Tom Scott from the BBC.

From the press release;

The BBC is an acknowledged leader in semantic web publishing and the use of metadata to create dynamically linked sites. Tom Scott has executive responsibility for three of the broadcast giant’s sites, which are often held up as exemplary projects within the Linked Data community. These are: the BBC Nature site (bbc.co.uk/nature) incorporating a major Linked Data and video publishing element; the BBC Programme Support site (bbc.co.uk/programmes), a website that publishes a page (URI and metadata) for every programme the BBC broadcasts; and the BBC’s Music site (bbc.co.uk/music), a website that integrates into the BBC broadcast systems and BBC Programmes.

I’ll be sure to link our final agenda here once it is available.

This morning we published a press release confirming that Prof. John McMillan, Australia’s Information Commissioner, will be one of the keynote speakers at the event.

From the press release;

In his session titled “The Open Government Reform Agenda”; Professor McMillan will examine the opportunities and challenges facing agencies as they move into this new era of open government.

In particular, Professor McMillan will provide an overview of how agencies are preparing for two significant features of the open government reforms that commence on 1 May 2011: the Information Publication Scheme (IPS) and Disclosure Logs.

Disclosure logs published by Australian Government agencies and ministers will provide a register of information released in response to access requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI Act), while the IPS requires a broad range of information to be published on agency websites. Professor McMillan will explain how these initiatives will work in tandem to achieve open government and succeed in transforming the freedom of information framework from one that is reactive to individual requests for documents, to one that requires agencies to take a proactive approach to publishing information.

The fourth Australian conference on Metadata Management (hosted by the Institute of Metadata Management), themed “Business Realities and Implications”, will be held at University House, ANU, Canberra on 25th, 26th and 27th May 2011.

About the Institute

The IMM offers both individuals and organisations the opportunity to participate in the development of metadata as a profession and to be at the leading edge of its utilisation as a core component of information management and business intelligence within the digital age.  (Link to http://www.metalounge.org/meta-2011-conference_presentations)

About the Conference

Event Aim:

To provide a forum for the discussion of crucial issues affecting our ability to manage information in the current complex market.

The Audience:

Managers and practitioners in a range of different execution and decision making environments looking for the opportunity to find solutions to real world problems faced daily.

Key Outcomes:  Delegates will leave with practical solutions, key contacts and a head full of ideas.

Previous Conference References:  www.metalounge.org (previously metadata Australia 2010)

The Key Themes

• Business Intelligence & Analytics – Achieving a joint position and understanding of metadata
• Technology Solutions, Data Integration and Hands-on Workshops
• Management, Governance and Stewardship – including Professional & Capability Development
• Overcoming obstacles in the Execution process – challenges and solutions

Who Should Attend

• Senior managers responsible for knowledge, records and information management
• Policy and technical metadata and data practitioners
• Researchers in information and metadata management
• Students from all disciplines related to information and communications management

Key Dates

• Wednesday 25th May  – current practices and experiences
• Thursday 26th May  –  emerging promises and issues
• Friday 27th May – practical sessions on the technology and research

Benefits of Attending and Presenting

• Networking with like minded practioners and thought leaders
• Exposure to emerging ideas and leading research
• Practical learning and evidence of successes for faster, cost effective implementation
• Next generation data and information management trends
• Membership to IMM

Presentations and Case Studies will be considered which include

• the application of metadata within information and knowledge management
• innovative solutions and ideas around metadata management issues
• practical solutions around applying metadata within the organisational context
• utilising metadata to enhance access and usability
• evidence of success and failure with lessons learned in implementation

We would ask that the following information be provided so that we can contextualise these

• Name of Organisation
• Type of Industry
• Particular Solution
• Line of Business Affected
• Location of Client
• Specific Business Challenge
• Overview of Approach
• Benefits of the Application
• Future opportunities and next steps

Submission guidelines

• Proposals should be submitted via our website at http://www.metalounge.org/Home.htm by 19th March, 2011
• Include a one paragraph description for use in the conference program guide
• Include a one paragraph describing the presenter’s background, credentials and experience
• Presentations will be limited to 30 minutes
• Presenters will be required to sign a Speaker’s Deed of Consent and Release to make slides and handouts available on CD and/or the conference website

Speaker reimbursement

• The conference is being run on a cost recovery basis to keep costs as low as possible for delegates
• Presenters will be required to register for the conference but the registration fee will be waived
• There may be some possibility to reimburse travel and accommodation costs for presenters outside of the ACT (within Australia only).  For further information on this please contact info@metalounge.org

Sponsorships

• Limited sponsorship opportunities are available for this event.  Further details are available here or contact us at info@metalounge.org

Critical Timeline

• Deadline for proposals:  19th March, 2011
• Notification of acceptance:  2nd April, 2011
• Deadline for final abstracts and bios:  29th April, 2011
• Deadline for final presentation slides and related documents:   13th May, 2011
• Conference:  Wednesday 25th – Friday 27th May, 2011

Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) have published a report outlining what they call their megatrends and megashocks titled “Our Future World: An analysis of global trends, shocks and scenarios”.

The five megatrends they identify in the report are;

1. More from less. This relates to the world’s depleting natural resources and increasing demand for those resources through economic and population growth. Coming decades will see a focus on resource use efficiency. 
2. A personal touch. Growth of the services sector of western economies is being followed by a second wave of innovation aimed at tailoring and targeting services. 
3. Divergent demographics. The populations of OECD countries are ageing and experiencing lifestyle and diet related health problems. At the same time there are high fertility rates and problems of not enough food for millions in poor countries.
4. On the move. People are changing jobs and careers more often, moving house more often, commuting further to work and travelling around the world more often. 
5. i World. Everything in the natural world will have a digital counterpart. Computing power and memory storage are improving rapidly. Many more devices are getting connected to the internet.

The trends themselves are not too much of a shock, however the data and supporting information that the document uses to support each one of them makes for a fascinating read. If you have some time to spare I would highly recommend taking a look.

As a society we have always understood the value of big pieces of information. Every day corporate moguls exchange it for power, spies have used it to bring down ancient kings, and criminals have occasionally been able to turn it into money by blackmailing a cheating spouse. However, at the lower end of the scale we’re probably just starting to understand the value of the information that we hold.

Over the last decade, as information based business models have evolved, we have seen a number of companies work out how they can translate information into revenue, in many cases turning that information into cash through the use of targeted advertising engines. These companies are able to take information from many sources, then process it to ensure that advertisers can target their adverts directly to the right individual or set of individuals.

Supported by advanced computing power, this new breed of company has been able to achieve two things. First of all the ability to process massive amounts of seemingly irrelevant information, enabling them to build complex demographic models that provide them with a deep understanding of societies behaviours and secondly manage and collect micropayments in exchange for the information that they have processed. In today’s environment information no longer needs to be big enough to bring down a king to be valuable, you can build a multi billion dollar business based upon information that sells many millions of times over for a single cent a time.

Who does this information really belong to though? Is information about what we eat and drink, where we visit, how healthy we are and what we like to do in our spare time something that should be public domain or should it be private information that belongs to each of us personally?

Today’s model is pretty straight forwards. Many of the companies that collect and process information about us provide us with valuable services in return. Instead of spending traditional cash for access to these services we are in essence (and sometimes unwittingly) investing our personal information in return for email, blogging tools and other similar services.

For those who choose not to use a particular companies services there is probably an unrealized loss, assuming that they own their information then they’re still investing the same information but as they are not using services their information is turned into cash through an advertising model which then goes straight to the companies bottom line profits.

In the future I would expect that we will see more evolution of this information to advertising model. Individuals are already beginning to recognize that their information has value, for the moment all you can do at that point is hide what information you can behind privacy permissions that are granted to you, in the future I think we will be able to do to more.

Assuming that the title of this post is fact then I expect we will eventually see mathematical models that help us understand the floating exchange rate between, for example, a home address and the New Zealand Dollar (which might be as low as a couple of cents), or the rate between the mapping of an individuals DNA and the British Pound (which would most likely be into the thousands of Pounds).

In essence information as a currency will be able to float in value alongside the rest of the existing currencies of the world. At that point individuals will be able make similar decisions with their information that they make with money today.

Should the DNA mapping of my next child be something that I can invest in such a way that it gathers interest and eventually pays for that child’s collage education, should I be able to spend the details of my family tree with a restaurant who in return throw us a lavish family party. I might be able to make an explicit decision to invest details of my online browsing behaviour with a company that in return pays me with free email and search services, rather than the implicit decision that I make today.

Going even further out I can see several good reasons why we could see information management be a product offered by banks alongside our existing checking and savings accounts, providing customers with “billpay” functionality that allows them to control where personal information goes, how it is used, and what they get back in return.

This post isn’t in any way a complaint about the information companies that exist today, merely an attempt to provoke a little thought around what comes next.

In 2010 information is currency, there are multi-billion dollar companies standing as evidence to that point. My question is about what new opportunities we can create as we gain a greater understanding of information based business models, and at the same time how likely are we as individuals to be able to recognize the value of the information assets that we hold?

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…

On a personal note, last year was a challenging one for me. I made a conscious decision to spend more time at home with the family, and took on a new role in Microsoft that would make that possible. So far, five months later, it has been a significant mental shift and has obviously resulted in a very different daily routine.

My previous three years were spent as Regional Technology Officer for our Asia Pacific business and pulled me into discussions about pretty much any technology policy related topic across Asia and the South Pacific. A broad set of topics spread across an even broader set of countries, both in terms of geography and demographics.

This new position revolves around the standards setting communities in Australia and New Zealand with three main areas of focus;

• Increase Microsoft participation in local standards development and testing activity
• Understand standards related requirements and policies in Australia and New Zealand
• Help the product development groups understand how they need to support us

The first five months have been a genuine voyage of discovery for me. I’ve met a long list of people in both countries with a lot of enthusiasm for IT standardization and all that it entails, I’ve been introduced to each of the respective government views on the role of IT standards in systems design and deployment (sometimes expressed in no uncertain terms!) and I’ve crossed the Tasman Sea more times than I care to count.

At the same time I’ve been discovering new parts of Microsoft. For the last fifteen years I have held various senior roles in our Public Sector sales organization, leaving that behind to join a more central corporate function has involved building new networks inside of the company and expanding the number of topics that I need to involve myself with inside of Microsoft. On some levels it amazes me that it is possible to spend almost a decade and a half with a company and still find news areas that drive significant personal growth within the organization.

Finally, the field facing team that I’m now part of is a new component to our corporate standards group. Our corporate standards organization has been around for a few years now but last year was the first time we put dedicated people in the national subsidiaries with a focus on standards related work. The result, as with any new team, is that we have had to find ways to work together. Just getting to know the people that I work directly with has taken up a significant chunk of time over the last few months.

In many ways 2009 was a reboot and restart year for me… it involved massive personal and professional change and I think I’m only just starting to feel like I have some sense of clarity around what I need to be doing from here.

I’m conscious that a number of things I wanted to do in 2009 didn’t get done, my most significant failing over the last few months has probably revolved around communication. This blog is an example, it has been getting very little of my attention in recent months – I’m assuming that readers have little or no interest in the details of my long list meetings involving introductions to new people and organizations.

So I begin 2010 with a long list of new people that I now work with (inside and outside of Microsoft), some ideas around how I think Microsoft can do a better job of working in this area in Australia and New Zealand and a handful of personal projects that I want to get done over the next twelve months that I think will benefit the standards development environment in general.

I’ll find the time over the next few days to write up a few of those in detail… I promise!

For governments, the digital revolution presents some important challenges, including how best to ensure that their digital documents will be accessible and readable essentially forever, regardless of how technology evolves. This is a question I encounter often in my role as a Regional Standards Officer, working with various public agencies in Australia and New Zealand that have responsibility for archiving records and other documents.

Fortunately, the challenge of e-archiving has been addressed over the past decade or so through standards development and other collaborative efforts around the world. International standards offer guidance on how to capture documents and how to use metadata to ensure that they can be located and understood by future generations. Published specifications for the Open Document Format (ODF), Open XML and Portable Document Format (PDF) also ensure that documents in these formats will be readable long after the formats are obsolete.

That said, a lot more work is still to be done.

Although ODF, OpenXML and PDF account for the bulk of documents produced today, other formats need to be documented. Microsoft has put documentation for our Office binary formats, for example, into the hands of the British Library for reference by future generations. We encourage other vendors to take similar steps with their storage formats.

New standards are needed to ensure retention of at least some of the massive volume of data produced in social networking activities, such as the micro-blogging increasingly used by elected officials to interact with constituents. Broad collaboration on enhanced standards and processes would help clarify how much of this data needs to be retained, and how to store it.

Microsoft is committed to working with governments and all other interested parties to meet these challenges and preserve the history of this decade, and the next, and the next.

To use the service just tweet your flight number, the airport you are in and the hashtag #boarding in a single tweet. The service does the rest, including adding you to a map of the world that it maintins.

Last night when I was leaving Singapore I thought I would give it a try, the tweet read…

The service quickly replies with a confirmation.

Moments later I see an RT from a bot that appears to have recently started consolidating anything that is said by anybody from Microsoft.

… and then some good news, there is somebody else in Changi on Twitter using the same service.

grrrrrrrrrrrr.