TweetMP addresses the Public Sphere

Update: I neglected to mention – A huge thanks to @piawaugh and @katelundy for making Public Sphere happen, and for providing great support for something so fundamental to Australia’s Democratic progress!

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@cvertex and @damiendonnelly (accompanied by @mfuntanilla) just returned from Capital Hill after what was a very inspiring meeting of minds, seeking to bring about “Government 2.0”.

Lindsay Tanner did a very good speech announcing the Government 2.0 taskforce (I’m not sure why that isn’t a .gov address) and we had a brief talk to Nicholas Gruen who seemed very open to the ideas presented at the conference.

One of the most noteable lines came from the Google Geo spatial division’s Raul Vera (@orbitist) “There should be public access to data that was paid for by the public”. Following this, Open Australia’s @matthewlandauer continued

to trail blaze and solve the problem of citizens trying to solve their problems, and presented a pretty logical model.

We made a very short 5 minute debut (which apparently lasted 7 minutes) where we laid out a road map of how we are going to try and make all of this Twitter communication more efficient for MPs, and how we can empower groups to achieve greater leverage through organising, and acting.

The Tweetdecks were furiously tweeting, to the point where #publicsphere actually trended higher than the now infamous #utegate. As far as I can tell, no fake emails originated from the crew below.

Unfortunately @vandelizer couldn’t be with on this trip, despite doing some digital coordination for us from afar.

As for outcomes, we met a lot of people keen to help us on our way. The SA Premier’s office is going to give us a little help getting the SA MP data together, because Premier Mike Rann seems to be tweeting like it is going out of fashion (1,365 Twets at time of posting – keep up the good work!) – and the inside word is that Nick Minchin is very close to joining Twitter.