I was in the e-community stream on the panel discussing "what are the possibilities".

Listen in.

My slides is below, and the text follows:

Let me start with a quote from Tim Berners-Lee - the inventor of the internet.

"The danger is not that we ask too much of the internet, but too little, that we turn it into just another piece of kit when it could be so much more significant than that, a new platform for how we could organise ourselves, to find knowledge together, to work out what is true and decide together what we should do about it."

Before I offer you a few ideas on what broadband makes possible, I'd like tug on some important and connected threads to set the context:

My first thread: This discussion is not about technology it is about people - it is about humans and human lives, and human communities - local or virtual.

My second thread: Broadband enables an increasing quantity of innovation at an increasingly fast pace. This is a fact. It won't slow down and it will get faster. As Mark Pesce says - "Broadband is the oxygen of the 21st century".

Work

Over in the e-business stream they are talking about work in the e-business stream. But I think it is important in the context of communities. The people on my team, the Energetica team all spend more time with their families and have significantly lower carbon emissions because we all work from home. We can only do that because of broadband. We do it well, but there are some things we will do better with better broadband - such as a full team video conference.

Geography no longer determines where you work., and this is an exciting possibility for the regional and rural communities of Australia. Regional Australia could become the new place to outsource. The customer service person you talk to for your insurance or your bank could be in their own office in Moree or Albany or Ulverstone. This helps to keeping local communities vibrant and enriches our entire society.
The Cloud Information and applications accessed over the internet is known in technojargon as the cloud.

People and organisations make better decisions when they can find information, make quality assessments of it, combine it with other information, or in technojargon, mash it up

Imagine a mashup of your entire life. The automatic synchronisation of all your devices - PC - Laptop - mobile - and that long promised internet refrigerator, so that your device knows where you are and what you are doing, giving you the right calendars, maps, documents and data for where you are right now. At your cousin's BBQ this would mean photos of your holidays on your mobile. At this conference on my laptop, it could tell me who is here that I know and where I can find them, and open chat connections across the floor, or with any of the people at the remote events.

My information and my communities would travel with me and be delivered in context from a single malleable interface.

Inclusion

How can the cloud make a difference to social inclusion? As more and more of our community service organisations gain operational efficiencies and increase their own capacity then service delivery will improve. Better community service organisations means a better and more inclusive community.

In many cases, however, it will be people themselves finding their own communities. Virtual worlds can often be places of liberation and inclusion.Just a few weeks ago Bigpond started metering, or charging for the download required for their "islands" in the virtual world called Second Life. The effect of this business decision went much deeper than a minor increase in cost.

Someone calling themselves Melodious, responding on the SMH website said this:

"Second Life and the internet in general are very real ways that people with disabilities communicate and socialise. ...As someone with disabilities who has been housebound, online communication is a lifeline. ... people who cannot have visitors or cannot sustain communication with others for whatever reason, online gives them the opportunity to do so within their own time and energy."

The internet is a powerful social inclusion mechanism.

Community and collaboration

Open source communities are a great example of how a group of interested people can get together online and make things happen. It was natural that software development has led the way in online collaboration, but open source communities no longer own the stage.
Lets look at some current examples: ASIX - Australian Social Innovation Exchange is an open community of people creating social innovation ideas. Wikipedia is the creation of an incredible resource by a vibrant community of contributors. SETI - the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence led the way in distributed computing, using idle computer resources and creating a community of people searching for little green men. Now there are communities sequencing proteins to help cure cancer, mapping the milky way, predicting climate.

This is a powerful concept - aggregating small contributions into big, important projects.

Participation

Participatory democracy - people involved in community decision making is a complex idea, with potentially powerful outcomes. Broadband can improve the quality of the decisions made in communities, and improve the level of participation in those decisions.

As an example: Local councils could provide detailed dossiers of issues relating to land-use decisions. These could include videos, 3D modelling, forecasts of environmental change, and include online town hall meetings. Interested people could respond with additional information, update the data, engage in debate and offer alternate ideas. More information - empowered people- better debate - better decisions.

I started with a quote from Tim Berners-lee exhorting us to ask a great deal of the Internet. This is my favourite quote from William Gibson.
"The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed."

I believe that what we should ask a lot of the internet. We should ask it to change the way we work, to create inclusion, to provide opportunity, to empower the voiceless, - we should ask the internet to redistribute the future.

Thank you.