Looking to the future

David Braue in ZDNet has a story about filtering today. But the small moment I want to refer to is the Q&A from the recent Communications Alliance Confrence. David wrote

Asked whether the off-topic abuse Conroy copped would rule out similar experiments in the future, Garlick was cautiously optimistic. "I think a lot of people were worried that the force of the comments directed at the other topic [filtering] would dissuade us from doing it again," she said, "but I think we did get some valuable lessons from it. Most people seemed to think it was a good way — more informal and transparent — for the government to communicate."

My small moment is that it was my question!

Meanwhile in other small moments the AFR BOSS magazine had an article in Where I get my ideas from (sub required) talking to Deena Shiff of Telstra.

She talked about a book called The Origin of Wealth which she has been apparently dog-earring and going back to. It until now has been sitting unopened in my desk-drawer - I was drawn to it because it had an endorsement from John ay on the front cover.

But Deena went on to talk about a couple of websites she follows - but they were depressingly telco/technology focussed. From my days as a strategic planner and reading The Art of the Long View I try to maintain the discipline of conciously reading outside my normal reading modes. That means things like picking up the occassional street paper, odd magazines (like Enlightenment Next I bought in Melbourne last week), reading Quadrant and Dissent). I also conciously cultivate a contrarian stance - asking like the title of Barry Nabeluff's book Why Not?.

Conferences like the CA one on Broadband and Beyond reflect how mono-cultural the technology discussion can become. My brief summary was that the future being pictured looked very much like now - in other words it wasn't very future focussed at all.