the OpenAustralia Foundation » Presentation http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au Transforming democracy in Australia Sat, 17 Dec 2011 03:33:22 +0000 en hourly 1 The Network at the Heart of Democracy http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2009/08/15/the-network-at-the-heart-of-democracy/ http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2009/08/15/the-network-at-the-heart-of-democracy/#comments Sat, 15 Aug 2009 04:46:04 +0000 matthew http://blog.openaustralia.org/?p=358 Last week Thursday I had the pleasure of presenting the opening keynote at the annual System Administrators Guild of Australia conference.

I tried to create a historical context for what OpenAustralia is doing by looking at the time that the Westminster system, the political system that we have in Australia, was created. The Westminster system of representative democracy evolved as a very practical solution to the problems of governing a country democratically with very slow transport and communication.

Of course, many transport and communication technologies have been invented in the last 250 years, most noteably the Internet. Looking forward we can imagine many kinds of governance that become possible with the use of these technologies. You can view OpenAustralia as a stepping stone to these.

Today’s network, the internet, has already shown itself to be the agent of great change. In this talk I look at some of the new ways politics is coming to ordinary people and some of the incredible opportunities for the future. We have the potential to re-imagine the very core of our democratic system – but how can we do this without leaving people behind?

View more documents from Matthew Landauer.
]]> http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2009/08/15/the-network-at-the-heart-of-democracy/feed/ 1 Happy talk http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2008/12/12/happy-talk/ http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2008/12/12/happy-talk/#comments Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:05:29 +0000 matthew http://blog.openaustralia.org/?p=73 Last week I gave a talk at the Open Source Developers’ Conference in Sydney. It was great. The room was full, people were excited, asked great questions and even applauded. To round it all of, at the end of the conference I was voted best speaker of the conference. What a wonderful surprise.

I met many great people at the conference who told me how happy they were to see what OpenAustralia is doing and want to get involved. So, expect many new things to come. Stay tuned.

There were not any recordings made of any of the talks but do have a look at the slides.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: australia osdc2008au)

Katherine Szuminska and I will also be talking at the “Free as in Freedom” miniconf as part of the Linux Conference Australia (LCA) which is happening between 19-24 January in Hobart. Please come along!

]]> http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2008/12/12/happy-talk/feed/ 0 Talk to Sydney Ruby on Rails group http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2008/03/01/talk-to-sydney-ruby-on-rails-group/ http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2008/03/01/talk-to-sydney-ruby-on-rails-group/#comments Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:20:19 +0000 matthew http://openaustralia.org/?p=8 About two weeks ago I gave a talk to the Sydney Ruby on Rails group about “Building OpenAustralia”. The group is a committed bunch of very smart and entertaining web developers with a particular interest in the Ruby language and the Ruby on Rails web development framework.

The aim of the talk was to give people a general ideas of the aims of OpenAustralia as well as being a general “call to arms” for developers to help out on the project.

See the slides of the presentation:

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