Latest Story
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A National Positioning Infrastructure for Australia
Peter Woodgate | April 13, 2010The XXIV FIG (Fédération International des Géomètres) Congress to be held in Sydney 12 – 16 April 2010 will help highlight a critical opportunity for Australia; the opportunity to create a national positioning infrastructure.
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Mr Koala from Cairo to Sydney
Mark Gordon | April 13, 2010FIG holds its Congresses once every four years, and annual Working Weeks in between. So what makes the FIG2010 Congress in Sydney different?
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Daring to question “Open Identity”
StephenWilson | April 11, 2010Is the Open Identity movement making the world simpler? Or more complex?
There’s been intense renewed activity in cyber security under the banner "open identity". See http://openidentityexchange.org and http://informationcard.net. But something about the word “open” has never sat well with me in the context of "open identity". I wonder if the open identity community has co-opted the word as one of those unquestionably good adjectives … and twisted it a little?
Open standards and open government are obviously good things, and it’s clear what they mean. And open source has a lot of goodness attached to it, even if it’s not without controversy. But what exactly does “open” mean in open identity?
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Banksia Awards celebrating Australian sustainability innovation
Grazyna van Egmond | April 8, 2010It’s easy to become numbed by media saturation and apparent inaction over the ‘big’ issues such as ETS, carbon emissions and greenhouse gas, but for a change I’d like to celebrate the positive.
Sustainability and responsible environmental stewardship in Australia has come a long way since the inception of the Banksia Environmental Awards, 22 years ago.
In the early years the awards were dominated by initiatives such as farmland regeneration and pollution clean up schemes.
Obviously these types of projects were, and are, critical to improving and maintaining the environment around us, but contemporary environmental activists are just as likely to be wearing a suit as a pair of gumboots and tie-dye.
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Art, Archaeology, Crime and the Surveyor
Prof John Fryer | April 8, 2010When the XXIV FIG Congress hits town Sydney will be awash with surveyors. It’s an opportunity to highlight what a great career surveying can be. Surveying has many more possibilities and is far more wide reaching than most people imagine.
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Building the Foundation
Nicola Forbes | April 7, 2010Open Forum’s featured forum topic for this month is “Building Surveying and Spatial Capabilities”. I would like to consider a fresh angle to this topic by looking at the term “building”.
A strong foundation is a prerequisite to any building work. In New South Wales, the surveying and spatial capabilities upon which we rely have been built up in a relatively short time through hard won knowledge, experience and sheer hard work.
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National Compact heralds period of constructive engagement
Dr Ron Edwards | April 7, 2010The National Compact heralds a new era of collaboration between Government and the Third (not-for-profit) Sector.
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The Market Fever Index, issue 4
patrickcallioni | April 5, 2010Last month, the index stood at 122 (2273 items, with 2065 in the previous month and 1939 items originally). This month, perhaps because of Easter or perhaps because the smart money is now moving towards real estate, the index fell back to cover only 908 items, which gives us a value of just under 47.
To see if there is anything real going on, I will now also use a broader sample, changing the search to encompass the whole world. This search produces a total of 374,000 hits for the week in question, which now becomes our baseline or 100.
Let’s see what happens next month, with both series.
Meanwhile, my new book is out. Here is what Amazon says about Waves of Change: Managing Global Trends in the Financial Services Industry.
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Interview with Coralie Wales President Chronic Pain Australia
Coralie Wales | April 1, 2010Why did you originally decide to found Chronic Pain Australia?
I was working as a counsellor specialising in pain, and found I was receiving a distressing volume of calls from people who were at risk of suicide because they were at their wits’ end dealing with their chronic pain. When I looked for an appropriate community organisation to refer these people to for ongoing support I couldn’t find one. Someone had to do it!
What have been the most important milestones for the organisation since then?
In the beginning we focused on getting the infrastructure in place we needed to be in a sustainable position to help people. We have volunteers all over the country and it’s important we keep them safe.
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Big Issue lanches Womens’ Subscription Enterprise
Natalie Susman | March 31, 2010There are 110 000 homeless people in Australia every night. 46,000 of them are women, many of whom have children.
I began working with The Big Issue in 2008, initially leading the Marketing and Communications Team on the Homeless World Cup before becoming the Head of Corporate Affairs for the organisation.
One thing that became quite apparent early on for me was that while the Street Magazine Enterprise (whereby vendors sell The Big Issue magazine on the streets of Australia’s capital cities) showed remarkable outcomes for homeless and marginalised vendors, it predominantly worked well for men.
With women making up nearly 40% of Australia’s homeless population there certainly was a need to establish a viable and sustainable social enterprise that worked for them also.
The Big Issue has been operating in Australia since 1996 and has successfully worked in helping thousands of homeless and disadvantaged Australians to help themselves.
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Two days in Washington DC looking at the future of privacy
Malcolm Crompton | March 31, 2010Two significant events took place in Washington DC on 16 and 17 March 2010 and I was privileged to attend them both.The first was a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the International Association of Privacy Professionals. It was broadcast from the National Press Club of America and featured a panel of distinguished speakers debating "The Future of the Privacy Profession". The celebration also launched a new IAPP publication, "A Call for Agility: The Next-Generation Privacy Professional".
The panellists each drew out different aspects of a surprisingly unified view on what will happen over the next ten years.
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National Compact welcomes 100 Partners
editor | March 30, 2010
Today, the National Compact welcomes Drug Free Ambassadors Australia as the 100th organisation to sign up as a Compact Partner. This significant milestone comes only 12 days since the Compact was launched by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at Parliament House on 17 March 2010.
