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.

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.

The ACT Government has appointed formed ACCC Commissioner John Martin to review supermaket competition policy in the ACT. The terms of references for the review are:

• the extent of competition in the ACT supermarket grocery sector in the light of the findings of the 2008 ACCC Inquiry into the competitiveness of retail prices for standard groceries;
• likely future trends in the structure of the ACT and Australian supermarket grocery sector;
• how the ACT Government can support effective and sustainable competition in the grocery sector;
• policies that might be applied on a site by site basis to ensure site allocation supports the ACT Government’s longer term policy objectives to promote competition and diversification; and
• any other additional measures that might be considered by the ACT Government to support a diverse and competitive retail grocery sector over the medium to longer term.

It’s critical we have healthy competition in the supermaket sector here in Canberra, with room for majors, independents and locally run stores.

There will be a series of community consultations on the review next week at the following locations:

• Tuggeranong
  Date: 13 July 2009
  Time: 12.30–2.30 pm
  Venue: The Vikings Town Centre
  Cnr Athlon Drive & Rowland Rees Crescent Greenway ACT 2900
• Woden
  Date: 13 July 2009
  Time: 6.30–8.30 pm
  Venue: Canberra Southern Cross Club
  92–96 Corinna Street Woden ACT 2606
• Gungahlin
  Date: 14 July 2009
  Time: 12.30–2.30 pm
  Venue: Gungahlin Lakes Golf Club
  Cnr Gungahlin Drive & Gundaroo Road Nicholls ACT 2913
  
• Belconnen
  Date: 14 July 2009
  Time: 6.30–8.30 pm
  Venue: West Belconnen Leagues Club
  Hardwick Crescent Kippax ACT 2615
• Civic
  Date: 16 July 2009
  Time: 5–7 pm
  Venue: The ACT Legislative Assembly Building
  London Circuit, Canberra ACT 2601

Written submissions will also be accepted up to Friday 24 July. The email address for these and to RSVP for the public forums is supermarketreview@act.gov.au

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).

The ACT government has recently announced grants totalling over $144k to help prevent falls, a major cause of serious injury in older people and people with a disability. I know because my Nanna was in robust good health until at the age of 96 she fell and broke her hip. Infection set in and unfortunately she never recovered.

The one that caught my eye was the Tai Chi program at the YMCA. Weight-bearing exercise can help prevent osteoporosis and Tai Chi helps maintain flexibility and balance. The ability to maintain core strength as people get older is really important and its great to see focused funding to help provide access to programs such as these.

According the ACT Health site, the grants are broken up as follows:

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.

Senator Kate Lundy has attracted wide interest in her Public Sphere initiative, with the 2nd event being held tomorrow at Parliament House. Seats for the camp are booked out but people can still participate through Twitter (#publicsphere), videofeed and liveblogging through Sen. Lundy’s website.

The debate on how citizens effectively engage with Government is not new, but what is new is the ability to use technology and advances in communication as enablers to improve transparency, engagement and innovation.

The focus of Public Sphere 2 is “Government 2.0: Policy & Practice” and the Public Sphere team have assembled an impressive list of speakers. I’ve grabbed the agenda and speaker list below for info.

Further ideas and discussions on Gov2.0 can be found at the Gov2.0Australia Group.

For a bit of fun, I’ve wordled my blog to see how it comes out. The latest posts certainly seem to get priority…

www.wordle.net

Tomorrow is World Blood Donor Day and I’d like to encourage everyone who can donate blood to book in and donate on a regular basis.

As I have O- blood type, my blood can be given to anyone (as seen below in the blood type chart from the Red Cross site), so I try to donate my half a litre as regularly as possible. Recently we implemented a program in our business to encourage staff to give blood regularly during work hours.

The World Blood Donor Day is held each year on the 14th of June, which is the birthday of Dr Karl Landsteiner (1868 – 1943), the Austrian Nobel Prize winner who discovered the ABO blood group system in 1901.