(As a new councillor for InternetNZ, I will be pitching into the issues of copyright and censorship. I’ll blog all my InternetNZ work to keep folks following along at home up with the play. I’ll be walking the line between transparency and confidentiality, so I beg your forgiveness in advance if I don’t always provide blow-by-blow who-said-what-to-whom accounts of meetings.)

Today the members of the policy advisory group (PAG – what a lovely acronym) looking into the DIA censorware had our first phone meeting. We went over arguments for and against the filter, and attempted to identify the philosophical principles on which a response to the filter could be made. I was struck by how useful David Farrar was: he’s obviously spent a lot of time talking to people about this, and was able to play Devil’s Advocate when needed.

Aneesh Chopra is the US Federal CTO. The conversation on stage between him and Tim O’Reilly began with an explanation of the role of the CTO vs that of the CIO (Vivek Kundra). The impression I got was that the CTO has a political role while the CIO is more independent. Mr Chopra spent his time on stage clutching a Starbucks coffee mug and telling stories about the use of technology in healthcare, medicine, and other areas.

The second Clay, hairier and less well-dressed. Head of Sunlight Labs, part of the Sunlight Foundation. I was at his house on Monday night for a turkey cook-off between him and Chris DiBona of Google. Clay won, by the simple expedient of deep-frying his birds. Clay’s a good Southerner.

Apps for America, contest around data.gov. This is their second contest. (I apologise for not linking here, I’m blogging on the run at the conf–Google will find you the projects I mention here)

Clay Shirky, clad in the world’s shiniest shirt, was introduced as “The Oscar Wilde of the Internet” but that was doing him an injustice for Clay is a fantastic combination of thinker and public speaker. He entranced the audience.

He gave two examples: Apps for Democracy vs the LA Times Wikitorial. Apps for Democracy was a success, the Wikitorial not. Wikitorial was Times putting editorial online and saying “improve this like Wikipedia does”. It lead to: arguments, flamewars, spam, porn, goatse.

Tom Steinberg is my pioneer hero of open government. His group, MySociety, is a British non-profit building things on the web. His things work: fix rate for FixMyStreet is about 50%. That means 10s of thousands of real problems that will get fixed next year. He gave us some lessons that MySociety learned along the way. They’re things to watch for in other people’s projects.

Lesson 1: Great gov2 project combine services that normal people care about (people who don’t care about transparency) with transparency. People care about their roads. But you need transparency to get them the site they actually want.

I went through two telephones in this Colorado house and neither of them could hold onto the call. Now that’s frustrating! Here’s what I was going to speak about: I will talk about recent American software company acquisitions and what it tells us about the economy and the future direction of cloud computing. Then I’ll tell you how to teach your kids to program.

Links: FriendFeed acquired by Facebook (BusinessWeek), SpringSource acquired by VMWare (InfoWorld), Poison for Venture Capital (NY Times), the Scratch visual programming language.

Listen to my 16 July 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about Science Foo Camp which was at the Google campus last weekend: discovering new science from huge amounts of data, hormonal traders, personal genomics, and open publishing.

Below are my notes. I will update this post with links to audio when Radio New Zealand post it. Correction on the air I said the hormonal trader paper was published in PLoS but it was actually in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Listen to my 2 July 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about emotional robots, Kiwi web awards, and a new US government transparency web site.

Below are my notes. I prepare a small essay on the subjects I’m talking about because it helps me get my thoughts straight. We often deviate from the topic of my notes (as we did today with the long sidetrack into artificial intelligence). I look at my notes as where the conversation starts, not where it stops.

Listen to my 18 June 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about online dating scams, Twitter’s role in the Iranian election protests, and would have spoken about Chris Knox but we ran out of time.

Here are my notes:

Online Dating Scams

NZ Herald story

What: Websites that let people post their details and look for matches to date. Biggest is match.com. Because it’s the web, members are not necessarily in the same country.

Listen to my 4 June 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about national security and social unrest on the Internets.

Links:

Guatemala
The murdered lawyer
National Security
GhostNet

Guatemala

Guate is an unstable country. 36 years of civil war ended in 1996, but the unrest continues. This year has seen something new. My explanation here draws heavily on an article that blogger Xeni Jardin wrote for GOOD magazine, and on her posts for the BoingBoing blog.