The Open Government miniconf will explore open government around the country. We will look at technologies, policies and projects around the following themes:

* Transparency - open data and the growing data and policy visualisation movement, supporting public and private innovation
* Citizen centric service delivery - building services for people who don't (and shouldn't have to) care about government, enabling self service through digital services, online customer support and trying to get a cohesive whole of government approach
* Participatory democracy - broad citizen involvement in the policy and process of government
* Civic hacking - citizens and the community filling the gaps and being awesome

Please check out the wiki page where we are putting together a paper and strategy for our community ideas about open gov for 2013 at http://lca2013.linux.org.au/wiki/Miniconfs/OpenGovernment

The Open Government miniconf will be taking place in the MCC1 room on Tuesday the 29th January 2013.

There will be a state of the federation short keynote to kick things off and outline how Australia is going in the global context, the progress over the past few years and a short, interactive discussion session to identify key challenges and success criteria for open government that we will all be working on over the coming year.

We are coordinating some talks for the day and also invite you to submit a talk about open government or our themes of transparency, citizen-centric service delivery, participatory democracy or civic hacking.

We are accepting panelists for the 3 panels or 5 minute lightning talks for the end of the day. We also encourage you to post information about your work on the wiki so others can easily find you and connect with you on the day.

If you have a talk proposal you would like to submit please send it to our speaker liaison: henare.degan [at] gmail.com. We'll take talk submissions until Dec 31st and will announce the final schedule on January 11th here.

We would also love to see people from the open research space on the technology and data panels. The day will end with a combined session with the OpenStack crew, given cloud is of so much interest throughout governments.

Draft schedule will include (to whet your appetite):

09:00 - 10:00 Main conference keynote (Llewellyn Hall)
10:00 - 10:40 Morning Tea - uncatered (MCC Foyer)
10:40 - 11:00 "State of the Federation" Open Government opening address
11:00 - 11:20 Open discussion about what we want to see and achieve by lca 2014 - Please check out and contribute to the Open Government Roadmap wiki page, which we will wrap up about a week after linux.conf.au for distribution.
11:20 - 12:20 Service delivery panel - including case studies about Drupal, australia.gov.au, GovForge, "design thinking" and more
12:20 - 13:20 Lunch - uncatered (MCC Foyer)
13:20 - 14:10 Open data panel - including the tech, policy & resourcing strategies from federal and state government projects
14:10 - 15:00 Participatory democracy & civic hacking panel - including OpenAustralia Foundation projects, collaboration tools
15:00 - 15:40 Afternoon Tea - uncatered (MCC Foyer)
15:40 - 16:30 Lightning talks - cool FOSS and open culture projects happening throughout government
16:30 - 17:20 OpenStack/Cloud in Government session at the end of the day (combined session with OpenStack miniconf)

We look forward to seeing you there and hearing about your adventures in open government.

Pia and the Open Government Miniconf team including Henare Degan, Chris Beer, Stephen De Costa and Christopher Harrop. Also many thanks to Alison Stringer from NZ for her excellent advice, and Tristan Goode from the OpenStack miniconf for collaborating on the last session.

PS - you might want to check out the newly launched OKFNau community, as there are some user groups and communities in this space that you might want to join, or you could join the OKFNau mailing list to stay across a bunch of interesting open knowledge/open government things happening in Australia.