Venues: Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney

Tags and the use of tags is still emerging in Australia for the nonprofit sector. The greatest traction seems to be ( not surpirsing) from the tech nonprofit community and so #nptech is the most common. Is this too US centric? Well there is a large US contingent of bloggers and twitterers using it, but I like to think of it as international. So what about locally relevant content for Australia such as local competitions, funding opportunities etc?

We at Connecting Up Australia have tried to initiate some discussion around this with little response, however some of the "early adopters" and advocates in the social media community have picked it up and are using some Australianised tags such as nptechau and gov2au.

This generally means putting "au" on the end of a tag.

Two Nonprofit tags to start using :

• npau ( np= nonprofit, au = australian) - use to identify content / comments relevant for the australian nonprofit community.
• nptechau ( np= nonprofit, tech = technology related, au = australian) - use to identify content / comments relevant for the australian nonprofit community related to technology.

Tags need to be meaningful to the user group, so they do evolve.

Sometimes I tag a blog post or tweet with both "nptech" and "nptechau" if the content is relevant to the international community but I also wish to identify it as being created or sourced in Australia.

Lots of countries and user groups around the world are grappling with similar issues of initiating locally relevant tags to help identify local content from the large pool of US content or international content.

We have started a page at What the hash tag - to monitor use of tags : http://wthashtag.com/Nptechau 

Announcement from the Gov2.0 Taskforce on their blog - their report and 12 of the 13 recommendations have been accepted.

http://gov2.net.au/blog/2010/05/03/response-to-the-government-2-0-report/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Gov2Taskforce+%28Government+2.0+Taskforce%29

Now for the roll out.

The Queensland Government has already made some headway with the adoption of a new IP licensing protocol : GILF

The GILF is based on the international convention of "Creative Commons" - see the Australian organisation http://creativecommons.org.au . This is an alternative to Copyright and it is simple to use but allows holders / creators of intellectual property to share their materials for others to us - which furthers the creative sharing / building process.

Check it out for your organisation!

by Karen Gryst

The Gov2.0 Taskforce's Public Sector Information "Ideas" contest for nonprofit organisations received huge numbers of entries which is very exciting that there is so much traction around how we could innovate to use government information for collaboration and application in our contexts.

The winner is.............“Indicators of social inclusion in local geographic areas for planning an evaluating community services” from Helen McGuire, which proposed that data should be published on key social indicators based on local geographic areas so it can be made available to community organisations, policy makers, and government funding bodies.

There were numerous great ideas - find out more here.

And for more on what the Gov2.0 Taskforce are doing click here.

5 Days left to enter - closes November 6 at 5pm.

Do you have an idea for using government information that you’d love to have but you can’t get now? Would you like to win $5,000 for your favorite nonprofit? Well, all you have to do is come up with a great idea for the nonprofit sector to use government information to make the world a better place. The contest details are below.

Who’s behind this? The Gov 2.0 Task Force, appointed by the Australian Government. http://gov2.net.au/

What’s Gov 2.0? It’s about governments being more open with information and using social media to communicate with the public, so they are more accountable.

So how does this contest work? The Taskforce will select the best idea(s) for using public sector information in a nonprofit/charity setting and award a cash donation of $5,000 to the charity/not-for-profit organisation of the winner’s choice.  http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/10/09/not-for-profit-psi/

What happens after that? The winner(s) (or their nominated not-for-profit organisation) will get help from Connecting Up Australia to scope their idea as a project proposal to the Taskforce.
What does that mean? It means that your idea may get funding from the Gov 2.0 Project Fund to be put into action.

How long have we got? You’ve got until 5pm Friday 6 November, so hurry. But don’t panic, you just need to generate the idea at this stage, but you’ll need to provide some broad details to allow the Task Force to make a decision.