If you’re interested in a subscription to Crikey at a discount price, go round and check out Nicholas Gruen’s post at Club Troppo.
Archive for the 'Administration' Category
The site will be down for about 20 minutes tonight around 10pm AEST for some tweaking. We hope it will also provide a faster browsing experience after the upgrade.
Update: Will now take place tonight.
I’m a bit late to this party, because I was away on holidays last week, but I think I’ve just managed to squeeze in a plug for the Overland subscriberthon while it’s still going! There are all sorts of prizes to be won for new subscribers, and a host of content from all sorts of luminaries on the magazine’s blog to celebrate.
Overland is a fantastic literary and cultural journal, which while long established, continues to bring fresh and interesting perspectives to all sorts of debates – with a democratic and political tinge. So do yourself the proverbial favour…
Yes, LP is now Twittering. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.
Heck you can’t avoid it now that it’s become the favourite plaything of the mainstream media. In fact it appears whole conferences are dedicated to Twitter – participants seemingly unable to talk about anything else.
As some of you may know I’ve been Tweeting my head off for a few years now, and jumping on and off the bandwagon. Now it’s become a part of the daily background hum.
I’m like a lot of web media workers for whom Twitter is now a work tool, but I also use it for a little bit of play, to inform and to annoy, to be annoyed and to be amused.
Lately it’s annoyed the crap out of me because the usual (and not so usual) social media suspects continue to overstate it’s importance. It’s not a replacement for anything, it’s an addition to something which already exists.
A quick post to plug a couple of things for the Centre for Policy Development:
The Centre for Policy Development is pleased to announce we are seeking applications for a new Sustainable Economy Fellowship. The fellowship is generously sponsored by Slater and Gordon and is offered through Centre for Policy Development’s new Sustainable Economy Program which aims to research and develop options for Australia to make a rapid transition to an economy that works within environmental limits and is socially sustainable.
The successful applicant will:
* Receive $10,000 financial support to work on a mutually agreed research project over a period of 3 – 6 months
* Have access to the CPD office and resources for the period of the fellowship.
* Have her/his research published as a CPD paper and launched at a high profile public event
* Receive intensive assistance in placing relevant opinion pieces in media outlets
* Receive media training if required
* Be mentored by leading experts in the field.Could this person be someone you know?
We are looking for someone prepared to imagine what a truly sustainable Australia might look like – and to research the policy ideas that can help us get there. This fellowship is suited to PhD/masters students or early-career researchers with an interest in connecting their work to current Australian policy debates.Applications close on Friday 6th November. Click here for more info and the online application.
Readers interested in sustaining the CPD’s activities might also care to vote in a poll being conducted online by Ethical Jobs, which will influence the distribution of $2000 to a number of non-profits this month.
We’ve been discussing issues about the future of the media and of journalism here at LP over a sustained period of time, and many will be aware of Margaret Simons’ work and commentary on these issues. She, along with Queensland writer and journalist Matthew Condon, will be speaking in Brisbane on Thursday night. Blurb provided by Kate Eltham from the Queensland Writers’ Centre:
QWC’s final Wordpool for 2009 is The Content Makers: the future of journalism presented by award-winning writer and Crikey blogger Margaret Simons, and moderated by author and journalist Matthew Condon.
This is a FREE event, co-presented with the State Library of Queensland, on Thursday 22 October at 6:30pm.
Continue reading ‘Simons and Condon on the future of journalism; Brisbane event’
There’s a big confab on in Sydney on the 5th and 6th of November on all things social media and future of journalism – Media140. Rachel Hills is running a competition to win a free pass to the conference. For details, please see her post!
There’s been a fair bit of interesting reading about government 2.0 initiatives (the new ‘branding’ for what used to be called e-democracy or e-government) lately; probably prompted by a summit on the topic in Washington DC and the Australian government’s initiative in this area (and, no doubt, in some instances, by a confluence between the two).
Among notable articles are a somewhat sceptical take in the New York Times from Anand Giradharadas and much closer to home, a piece by Tim Watts at On Line Opinion:
It’s all too easy to get caught up in the “cool” factor of Web 2.0. The potential of the technology is so amazing that sometimes we can forget that at the end of the day, it’s still people on either end of the tubes. It’s important to remember that Web 2.0 is all about people. As Michael Wesch has said, “The Machine is Us”. The Government 2.0 Taskforce could do worse than to follow the lead of one of the great political campaigners of our time and hang a sign in the group’s (virtual) war room constantly bringing it back to this fundamental theme. It could read: It’s the Community, Stupid!
Watts’ argument, with which I would agree, might be summed up by the short paraphrase, “if you build it, they won’t necessarily come”. Or perhaps, as I’ve been arguing recently, some decisions have to be made about which populations are being incited to come, and for what purposes; I’ve previously written on some issues around the digital divide in discussing the Australian iniatives.
It seems to me, analytically, that a number of issues have to be sorted out which haven’t always been well thought through in much of the discussion of government 2.0:
I’m speaking on the 11th of August at an event organised by the Queensland Writers Centre:
Books in the Digital Age:The Future of Writing
With the rapid changes in Australia’s writing and publishing industry, where will books fit in the digital future and how will this affect how we read and write?
As part of QWC’s Wordpool series of three lectures for 2009, we’re looking at the the future of… books, writing and journalism.
Digital publishing invites writers and readers to think differently about the dynamic relationship between content and the container in which it’s consumed and shared.
Join Mark Bahnisch in a discussion as to what this means for Australia writers and readers, as he attempts to answer… what is the future of writing?
When: Tuesday 11 August, 6:30pm
Where: Room KG-B-304, Queensland University of Technology,
Kelvin Grove Campus
Cost: Free for QUT students, or $15. Bookings required
Bookings: Phone QWC on 07 3839 1243, or via www.qwc.asn.au
Cross-posted at BrisCulture.
I’ve been ‘waiting for the photos to prove it, but Merkel and the Mountain ( described here) is over, and Merkel came out with a points decision, despite some setbacks along the way.
The really short version is that I completed 536 kilometres of the 570 promised, with the missing kilometres the result of a mechanical failure that I couldn’t repair on the road towards the end of my second day’s riding (in short, a wheel that was unsafe to ride on, and Qantas’s cruel excess baggage policy meant that the spare wheelset was at home rather than in the car where it should have been).
But in any case, I did climb the Col du Tourmalet on my third day, and did it in one hour, 34 minutes and 30 seconds. While it’s way off the pros, it’s 12 minutes better than this guy from the New York Times, who did it fresh.
Continue reading ‘Merkel 1, Col du Tourmalet 0′
While the ‘economic management debate’ rumbles along its predictable partisan grooves, something interesting has been taking place elsewhere – something of a concatenation of the better legacies of the communitarianism of the 90s and a shift in values which has gained traction with the Global Financial Crisis. There has been increasing talk of the creation of social value and social creativity, and the harnessing of community connectivity through social enterprise.
In her post-political career, Cheryl Kernot has been actively working in these fields, and analysing them within academia. The latest edition of Griffith REVIEW, Participation Society, addresses many of these questions, and Kernot will be talking at the State Library of Queensland on Wednesday night at 6.30pm on ‘A Participation Society’, riffing off some of the themes of her GR essay.
Details of how to book tix and rsvp are on BrisCulture’s Facebook group.
Cross-posted at BrisCulture.
Folks might remember I talked a while back about the ‘Creative Brisbane’ event we’re presenting tonight as part of the Brisbane CitySmart Innovation Festival. The response to both this conversation and to the BrisCulture concept has been really exciting. I thought, therefore, I’d post a quick notice to let people know details of the event, should anyone who hasn’t already responded to our rsvp be interested in checking it out. Details are available at the BrisCulture website, and on the Facebook event page. Over the fold, I’ve posted the programme for the evening.
A lot of my academic and consultancy work at the moment is focused on online urbanism, distributed knowledge and urban creativity. I’m loath to use the term ‘action research’ loosely, but this form of public sociology is really impossible to separate from creative practice. One of the projects I’ve been working on with some lovely and talented colleagues is about to launch itself on the world, and now has its own web presence – BrisCulture.
While literature about Creative Cities abounds, every city has its own urbanism and its own distinct culture. A ‘one size fits all’ model doesn’t map neatly onto the specificities of place. While Brisbane is now on the arts map with new cultural infrastructure capable of attracting visitors in the hundreds and thousands to major exhibitions and events, what of the sustainability of the city’s everyday lived cultural experience and production? Our town has proved its value in fostering distinctive and innovative forms of cultural practice – the germination of the music scene in the Valley or the arrival of grunge lit being notable moments in time. But much of this activity takes place ‘underground’ – it bubbles up alchemically from below; drawing energy from serendipitous connections and a sense of locale. Although we welcome the era of government support, public art and creative industries policy, we contend that embedding, celebrating and fostering emergent practice is a task still to be thought out.
That’s the task we’ve set ourselves. It sounds ambitious, but it’s realisable because we’re approaching it as an exercise in making connections and fostering the art of public conversation and collaborative policy making. You can read about the project at BrisCulture and stay tuned for our first event. As part of the 2009 Brisbane CitySmart Innovation Festival, we are hosting a joint event with The Centre for Policy Development, and in conjunction with the Eidos Institute, on the 26th of May at the Old School of Arts in Ann Street, Brisbane – Creative Brisbane: Rethinking Innovation. This will only be the beginning – we’re conceiving BrisCulture as a rolling series of events, policy interventions, performances and conversations which exists in a virtual locale as well as in the spaces of the city.
If you’re interested in all this, whether as a Brisbanite, an occasional visitor, or just curious about the town, I’d encourage you to join our Facebook group, which will be utilised to keep everyone in the loop. I’m very excited about this project, and I think it will lead to some really interesting things!
Comments Policy clarification
There seems to have been a little confusion lately as to what is the proper netiquette for our traditional LP pseudonym play, especially for those who do not have gravatars and for whatever reason do not wish to register one to the email address that they use for commenting. Here is the updated relevant portion of the comments policy to clarify the matter:
Everybody clear now?