CollabIT Launch

Billed as a program to “create a supportive environment to accelerate the growth of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) throughout the ACT region”, CollabIT was launched last night by Chief Minister Jon Stanhope at Regatta Point.

Emerging from the highly successful Canberra.NET program, the Australian Information Industry Association has developed CollabIT to bring SMEs and large commercial organisations together to develop products and solutions for public and private sector clients. The program received funding support in this year’s ACT Budget.

And already there have been a number of success stories, building innovative partnerships that are helping drive economic growth in the Territory.

Further info is available at the Australian Information Industry Association website while my presentation from the event last night is available here: CollabIT Launch Slides.

Tsunami warnings miss the mark

The tsunami alert on Wednesday night was instructive in a number of ways.

I first picked up the news of an earthquake on twitter and then followed the subsequent tsunami alerts for a number of hours. Being concerned about family & friends living on the coast, I gave them a call (to a fair bit of derision I might add, the State of Origin was on!) and watched as steadily the tsunami warning system and the mainstream media started going awry.

The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre issued Lord Howe Island with a land alert at 9:07pm advising people to move to higher ground. The advisory said the next update would occur at 10:07pm. Apparently low lying areas on Lord Howe were evacuated. Marine alerts were also issued for Norfolk Island, NSW, Vic and Tassie shortly after. All warnings said they would be updated in one hour from the time of the alert.

Meanwhile, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii (part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US) had issued alerts earlier  for New Zealand and were the first to cancel all tsunami warnings at 10:47 UTC (8:47pm EST).

Mainstream media had started picking up on the alerts, with Channel 7 the first I believe to break into its programming for a news break. Newpapers like the Courier Mail got up and running and after the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre cancelled their warnings, the Courier Mail declared that all alerts had been lifted for Australia. That wasn’t the case.

At 10:07pm I watched for the scheduled update on the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre site for Lord Howe. Nothing happened. The scheduled times for updates for NSW, Norfolk Island, Vic and Tassie came and went. The national update due at 10:27pm didn’t appear.

The twitter folk started broadcasting that the Victorian warning had been updated, but it wasn’t on the main Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre page. I managed to find it eventually, buried on the Victorian Weather & Warnings home page. Other updates for NSW and Tasmania started to appear on their state home pages, but the main JATWC page still wasn’t updated.

Finally around 10:40pm, the JATWC site was updated, maintaining marine alerts for NSW, Vic, Tas and Norfolk Island and the land alert for Lord Howe. Reports started drifting in of a 30cm tsunami (?!) at Port Kembla and another report at Spring Bay in Tassie.

It became obvious that any danger had passed, given the time of the earthquake and that the warnings had said any tsunami would occur around 9:45pm. The alerts were lifted a couple of hours later.

The whole episode was instructive in a number of ways:

• The Australian Joint Tsunami Warning Centre failed to provide timely information. If there was a credible threat (particularly to Lord Howe which was on a land alert), updated information was late and ultimately inaccurate. Interviewed the next morning on ABC 666Canberra, a spokesman for the JATWC said that the warnings were indeed late and there had been no change to the alert status. However, if the alert status had changed they would have published an updated warning. This wasn’t evident on the alerts and so people were only aware the alerts were late. They had to assume the status hadn’t changed and were not aware that “no news means no change of status”.
• There appeared to be no integration or coordination with the warnings issued from the US Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre. The official interviewed by Alex Sloane on 666 appeared miffed that there were two different sets of warnings being issued, that people might pick up their information from different sources and that this might be confusing.
• Mainstream media had no more access to information than the web-connected community. That the media failed to analyse the information and provide accurate reporting of the event is an indictment on the fourth estate
• twitter served a very clear purpose as a vehicle to provide real time accurate updates and information. There is an excellent opportunity for emergency agencies to provide timely, focused and cost effective information using twitter.

The tsunami alert provided a stark confirmation of the way the web failed to provide accurate information during the Black Saturday bushfires earlier this year. As Robert Manne points out in July’s  The Monthly magazine, on Black Saturday, the Country Fire Authority website in Victoria was not updated with accurate, timely information. CFA communications units on the ground failed to check if their urgent information releases had actually made it on to the site. People relying on information from emergency agencies using the internet as the focal point for communications were placed at greater risk because of the lack of timely, accurate information.

The situation with the tsunami alerts was reminiscent of this situation. People will increasingly use the internet as a key source of all available information. They will attempt to dissect, analyse, read and publish the information any way they can. The sooner governments acknowledges this fact, and make effective use of the communications tools available, the less likely a lack of timely, accurate information will place the community at greater risk during a natural disaster.

ACT Solar Power Facility Public Consultation

The first round of public consultations for the ACT solar power facility finished last week. I’ve attached a PDF of the slideshow for info:

Solar_Facility_Powerpoint_Presentation_June_2009

The criteria listed for selection of the site are:

• Cleared land with no significant shading
• Level land with a gentle gradient, preferably north-facing
• Land suitable for access roads
• Located near a connection point to a high voltage transmission network
• Access to a suitable gas supply
• Assess to a water supply and waste water disposal
• Separation from domestic residences
• Not overlooked by significant population centres
• Located way from major plumes or sources of dust; and
• Appropriate zoning and environmental considerations

To my untrained eye, the site at Ingledene Forest would appear to be more appropriate than Kowen Forest. The Ingledene area looks like this:

Whereas, Kowen is more heavily wooded:

(Oh, and one minor Gov2.0 gripe, why have a jpg of Ingledene and a pdf of Kowen, both nearly half a meg in size? Doesn’t make them quickly viewable or comparable for most people… I’ve converted the Kowen pdf to jpg and compressed it so it’s more easily read on this page).

Energy Efficiency = Lower targets for renewables

My fave insightful webtoonist Stuart McMillen published his treatise on energy efficiency back in April. I thought it was worth reproducing here.

The fundamental tenet is that as we continue to innovate appliances to reduce their energy usage, we can reduce our energy demand to a level that can be met by renewables.

Local ICT Market gets the wobbles

It’s a tough time in the Canberra ICT market at the moment. Darwin-based CSG is one of many organisations to shed local jobs over the past couple of months. CSG acquired the Commander/Volante business a while back and have struggled to retain existing federal government contracts such as the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry (DAFF), which has been awarded to EDS.

This along with other “downsizing”, the euphemistically named “right-sizing”, and the Gershon Review into federal ICT spending, has meant the ICT jobs market has freed up remarkably over the past 6 months. Whereas before people were effectively able to name their salary, it’s now much tougher to get a good gig in a quality organisation.

In the private sector, it is those companies that have long term strategic plans, a focus on customer outcomes and the ability to provide flexible working conditions that are managing their way through the downturn and still attracting quality people. It’s something we should be encouraging across government and business alike.

Solar Power Facility Sites

The community consultation process for the ACT’s solar power plant has kicked in – details are available here. Signage at the potential sites at Kowen and Ingledene will go up soon with public meetings being scheduled for June. A Context_Map is available showing both locations.

I’m very excited about this project – it’s something I campaigned for in last year’s ACT election and I’ve blogged about it in the past.

One thing I’m trying to get more info on is the potential location at Kowen in relation to the Sparrow Hill MTB trails. It doesn’t appear to be the same spot – a lot of mountain bikers would be very unhappy if it is.

ACT InnovationConnect Grants announced

The Chief has announced the latest InnovationConnect grants. Winners of the dollar-for-dollar funding are:

• GPT Designs, a high-tech Canberra manufacturer of audio equipment for the hearing impaired, received $40,000 to develop a system to help the hearing impaired in large venues such as stadiums and concert halls;
• Ingenate was awarded $25,000 to develop a solution to treat grease trap waste, using a combination of algae and bacteria;
• Q-Motive received $15,000 towards the development of a prototype rally car seat.

Solar Option for Data Centre

The proposed ActewAGL data centre and power generator south of the Mugga Lane landfill area presents a great opportunity to examine the use of a sustainable and cost-effective solar generation system.

This is a superb project for the ACT and I support it strongly. While gas fired power generation is a big step toward sustainability in energy supply, ActewAGL should use the extended consultation period to take the next step and assess the viability of an alternative solar option. This would help allay the concerns of residents close to the site and would place the ACT at the forefront of sustainable infrastructure development.

Canberra is a smart city with a wide range of home grown businesses that punch well above their weight nationally and internationally. We have a world-class University sector with some of the best and brightest minds living and working in the ACT.

The recent announcement that ActewAGL and the ACT Government will undertake a feasibility study into a Solar Power Plant that can power 10,000 homes demonstrates that this technology is viable. The ACT can and should be a world-leader in solar technology and the data centre can be the next example of our ability to apply that technology.

Should I be elected to represent the people of Molonglo I will be arguing for exactly this type of enhancement to the industrial and economic base of the ACT – a green alternative that offers new employment opportunities while reducing greenhouse gases and our reliance on fossil fuels.

Helicon Double Layer Thruster

Without getting too geeky, I’m constantly amazed at the quality of scientific research coming out of Canberra. Take the Helicon Double Layer Thruster for instance.

At the ANU in 2003, Dr Christine Charles created an idea for a spacecraft propulsion engine based on technology invented by Professor Rod Boswell.

Dr Charles and her team have since gone on to work with the European Space Agency to prototype the propulsion system and their work has attracted a great deal of attention around the world.

Essentially, electrically charged particles pick up energy as they travel through layers of different electrical properties. Gas is converted into a “true” plasma thruster that then ejects equal numbers of both positive ions and negative electrons. For a 5 hour burn, you only need 0.8g of propellant. With that sort of economy, the vision is to have the HDLT used for long range spaceflight to Mars.

As I mentioned a while ago in a post about Solar Sliver Cells, we need to ensure we maximise the development opportunities here in Canberra for this type of research, and not just see it disappear overseas because the political or economic impetus is not here to support its development.

Government Energy Consumption

Recently I’ve been having a think about how governments can help reduce carbon emissions, particularly in the area of technology usage and the associated high energy requirements.

Departmental data centres chew up millions of kilowatts of power each year. When procuring equipment as part of the necessary refresh cycle, government agencies don’t place a great deal of focus on the cost of powering the equipment or on the carbon emissions necessary to develop, build and run the infrastructure.

New approaches to IT infrastructure can help reduce costs and power consumption. A good example is the use of virtualisation, where a physical server is utilised by a range of resources, operating systems and applications, rather than it traditionally having just one function. Introducing virtualised environments means a reduction in the number of physical servers, meaning there is a strong decrease in overall power usage.

If we could develop a whole of government baseline for energy consumption and associated costs in infrastructure, and in particular, data centres, we could help drive down costs and emissions without affecting service delivery for critical systems that drive government program outcomes. Unfortunately at present there is sporadic baseline information available from agencies on just how much power is consumed. Some government agencies provide reasonably accurate data, others frankly have no idea. In order to develop achievable targets, we need accurate figures on current energy consumption.

If baselining and targets were developed on a national basis with state and territory governments adopting the same standards, even better.

We as a community would end up with more efficient program delivery and reduced carbon emissions, while importantly, government took a leadership position on practical measures to set and achieve emission targets.