Collaborative Internet Innovation Fund

We’ve noticed the Powerhouse Museum is doing quite a bit to engage with other institutions and the public in order to share and build knowledge of its collections and collection themes.  One example worth mentioning is the Australian Dress Register, which documents clothing in New South Wales up to 1945.

According to the website, “the online resource will encourage collectors to consider their collections very broadly and preserve and share what they know about people, their dress and life in the past.”  It’s great to see the museum realising the wealth of knowledge the public has, and providing a platform for the public to contribute.

At our recent information sessions many people asked how they could meet other organisations interested in cIIF.

One way that we thought we could help facilitate this is by providing a space for you to post a short summary about your organisation or your project idea for others to respond to.

Be sure to add your comment to the ‘find someone’ category and include relevant contact details in your post.

A question from the recent information sessions has been “what is meant by next generation ICT?”.

When we talk about next generation ICT we are referring to the start of a new era in using ICT, where all the possiblities of new technologies have yet to be discovered.

The ingredients of this new era are:

• widespread deployment and take-up of high capacity broadband
• connecting up a mass scale of people and multiple digital devices
• use of the internet as the key channel for users to communicate and collaborate

In other words the network is becoming a platform for activity.

This platform presents great opportunities for innovation through harnessing the power of networks, collective capabilities and large-scale information.

• Google AdSense (recommends advertisements based on your own particular site content)
• Flickr (builds a social community where photos can be shared and printed out as need be)
• Wikipedia (users collaborate to build a database of knowledge)
• Google Maps (users can manipulate maps to suit their viewing needs)
• del.icio.us (users can bookmark and share web pages of interest)
• Twitter (social messaging where users send status updates)

Need more information?

• You Tube has more about web 2.0 and the evolution of the web to date
• The OECD has published their findings from their study of the participative web and user-created content

Feel free to post examples you have come across that demonstrate innovative use of next generation ICT.

I’ve been reading about a pilot program called FloodSMS, where two organisations have been working together to build a flood warning system. With around one-sixth of the globe’s population considered to be in the pathway of a potential major flood, projects like this have the potential to help some of the world’s poorest citizens. Rural villages such as those that live off the Mekong River exposed to the threat of flood on a far too regular basis.

The pilot program aims to give people in the Terai region of Nepal-India up to 24 hours warning of a potential flood. They’ve proposed to use technology such as inputs from stream gauges, satellite remote sensing equipment and local topography and hydrology to create the geographic information system (GIS) based application, which will interpret the inputs and automatically alert the entire potentially affected area with early warning SMS messages.

The project proposal submitted to the 2008 USAID Development 2.0 Challenge - check out NetSquared for their full submission.

This is a US website that provides a window into the goings-on of a certain US city or block.

Information might include photographs highlighting area features, restaurant inspections, stories from journalists and the like. What a great resource for people visiting a certain US city and want to find out what to do, or businesses looking to expand business to a certain area…

EveryBlock.com

Need even more inspiration for your project? Have a look at the SEOMOZ.org Web 2.0 award finalists for 2008.

Fix My Street is a well-renowned UK website that is often mentioned in the press as a great example of collaboration and efficiency.

Users can report, view or discuss local problems by locating them on a map or entering a postcode. The relevant council is then alerted by email. Additionally, civic problems can be discussed online with the view to gathering a group of like-minded people to lobby the relevant council for resolution. Gone are the days of door knocking in your local area and partitioning for signatures, or trying to find out who the most relevant councillor is that can solve your problem.

FixMyStreet.com

As an example of what government can do in the web 2.0 collaboration space, the New Zealand government has published this great wiki called ParticipatioNZ wiki.

The intention is that the feedback received on policies and services can be fed back to the relevant government agencies and responded to efficiently.

We like that it focuses on including “your feedback” and is set up to “share ideas and knowledge” in order to improve what could be a very internalised and narrow vision.

Welcome to the cIIF blog!

This blog is written by a team at Multimedia Victoria who work on the Collaborative Internet Innovation Fund (cIIF), a new Victorian Government funding program.

The team will be regularly posting on topics such as innovative uses of next generation ICT, what is happening in web 2.0, and inspirational projects from around the world.

We hope to motivate you to apply to cIIF program with your great project ideas, and encourage you to send us questions or to post comments on topics of interest.