John Hilvert, the Australian: What you have put up there I have heard for a while and have been writing about for a while. What I was hoping to get from the talk and I was hoping that you might like to tease out a bit more is, is there any particular big missed opportunity for Australia generally? Given that Australians - I think we are in the top three or four users of the Net and its almost boring writing about the Net frankly. It's very hard to get close to the front page writing a Net story unless it's an ooh, arh type thing. Given that Australians are generally sensitised to the Net what compelling opportunity is the Government or the Australian community generally in danger of missing? I take your point about the general cluelessness of our politicians but they're also driven to some extent by their constituents. Are there any particular areas or fields or issues that you would like to see picked up or run with far more quickly than is currently the case? Or am I hearing a bit of a counsel of despair?
Worthington: There are so many opportunities. It's hard to pick one and also to some extent it's very hard to know in advance which fields are going to go ahead and which aren't. I may not be any better at picking winners than anybody else. One obvious one is regional development. In terms of the Internet we dominate the region. There are lots of countries that we could help to develop their infrastructure and we could create a huge export industry for Australia in doping that. We are not because I think our business leaders and our politicians think that the IT people mustn't know what thewy are talking about because they are Australians. There is so much that we can do there.
I have an invitation at the end of January to attend the South East Asian Regional Computer Congress which Australia is a member of. It is actually meeting in Kathmandu and the other computer societies of the region are very keen to work with Australia on these sorts of developments. So that is one area. We could help wire the region in effect.
There are so many others. Just building an Internet infrastructure, for example, for rural outback Australia is a place where we could invent some new technology which we could then export to other areas that are sparsely populated. But there are so many others, it's hard to pick one in particular.
Another one, for example is what is the Internet equivalent of broadcasting? All of the newspapers have had a stab at doing online newspapers. Some tv stations have had a bit of a go at it. But what is the equivalent of that for online applications. For example, for the amount of money that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is spending on their satellite tv to Asia they could set up the most advanced, online service in the world, instead of a fairly mediocre satellite tv service of the sort that lots of other people have already done. Those sorts of opportunities.
Bruce Juddery, freelance: You talked about the ignorance of our politicians. You cite Kate Lundy as being on of the few people in shining armour, St Joan, I suppose. Kate Lundy is only a kid, of course. She's about the same age as my children, or perhaps a year or two older. Bill O'Chee is hardly an ancient mariner. I'm 55 and I've limited my knowledge of email, the net and so forth to what I actually need. Aren't you being a bit unkind to our politicians, most of whom are fairly elderly people but not quite as elderly as myself and who haven't been in this technology since day one, as you have been. How do you give them a dose of monkey glands or sup at the water of the fountain of youth to enable them to adjust to this sort of thing? Do you have any sort of strategy apart from dying out to solve this problem? Second question, two days ago Peter Reith invited everybody in his various departments to email him on public service reform. Have you got any idea of whether he is actually going to read it all?
Worthington: The first was about, maybe the youngies are doing it but they're not the people in charge in effect. There are two things about that. One is that you get the youngies interested in it and hopefully when a senior politician who is not all that comfortable with operating a keyboard wants some advice on what to do, they will turn to their younger colleagues who they see as knowing about computers but also being in their party and onside politically, for advice. That's one thing, they'll turn to their junior colleagues. You can get people up to speed fairly quickly with this technology by showing them how it works, showing what it can do for them, rather than a computer salesman approach of doing a whole lot of whiz bang things that are completely irrelevant to them. That's two approaches. I hope that we don't have to wait 20 years for the politicians to move up before we have the senior ones worrying about these sorts of things, plus they turn to people like the Australian Computer Society for advice on occasions. I've forgotten the second question.
Juddery: What's the risk or the chance that Peter Reith is going to read all the email sent to him on public service reform and ultimately - this is the serious part of the question, I suppose - you are going to need a human interface between all those emails and the ministers if they are going to get any sensible advice. They have been chopping the shit out of the public service. Is there any chance that that compression and transmission mechanism which has got to be human, going to be there, or is all this wonderful email consultation going to be 95 per cent a pack of hot air?
Worthington: One of the opportunities we have for producing Australian products is to deal with that problem of floods of email. I'm president of a body with 15,000 members. I look after Web homepages for major organisations. My email address is on hundreds of Web pages but I still get a manageable amount of electronic mail.
There are ways that you can sort and sift the mail and efficiently categorise it and then move it off to the appropriate person to answer. There are also ways that you can anticipate what mail you are going to get and answer it before people ask the questions, things called frequently asked questions, for example. You can use automated systems to do that. That's one of the things where there is a great potential to develop products to do that sort of thing. In practice I have not found the flood of email a great problem. I spend most of my time answering email but that is how I do most of my job and it can be very efficient. There are problems with letting it take control. But it is manageable.
I can't speak for Peter Reith. there are ways you can ....
Juddery: The Public Service Commission ...
Worthington: I don't speak for the Public Service Commission but there is relatively simple technology, even things like, if you ask for comments on a topic and people use the topic to reply to your mail, you can sort all the replies you get, so that all of the ones on that topic are together automatically to handle them. There are those little tricks and techniques that can be used. It's not really a great problem.
D'Arcy: Isn't the danger not so much that politicians don't know how to turn the computer on, more that they don't know what information is, that they don't understand the centrality of information when it comes to such things as productivity, that their is an industrial mindset when it comes to information which is taking the whole question of the age of information off the agenda, not that it has been on it?
Worthington: Yes. What we are doing is handling information and in some ways information is a non physical commodity and doesn't follow the normal physical laws which you would worry about if you were producing steel or stacks of coal or things like that and you need a different way of working, some of which can appear quite bizarre to people and it takes a bit of getting used to. But I think people can pick this sort of thing up fairly quickly.
Journalists, for example, are used to dealing with information all the time. That's their stock in trade, and librarians, for example. These are disciplines that are going to come to the fore in this new age, by the way. The librarians are doing very well out of the information superhighway because they are familiar with how to sort and sift information.
Chess Krawczyk, Digital. Tom you said that cable television to the home or wireless is the way to go. I use the Internet everyday all day. I lose productivity because I don't have my pictures cached, I sit there waiting for a long time to get a document. So my first question is bandwidth How soon can we get realistic bandwidth knowing that Telstra has just finished its technical trial and is going to start its commercial trial. It's not available even if you have the money today. And secondly, content. There's a lot of information on the Net. Until you start looking for relevant information and it's not there, it's held by people who have commercial vested interests and you can't get information that you really want. There is an overflow of volume and an absence of quality and content.
Worthington: That was a two part question as well. The first one was about bandwidth. In doing Web pages and so forth I have used a technique to minimise the bandwidth to make it possible to work over things like low speed wireless connections, for example. There is an opportunity there to build smarter Web browsers and other intelligent devices to squeeze the mot out of the bandwidth. For example, here you get a little version of the picture, there's one, and if you want it you can get a bigger version. I do that manually but it is possible to automate that process even to the point where the user doesn't realise that it's happening, they just see a picture and it appears to them that it appears to them perfectly fine, the system automatically adjusts the resolution to suit the bandwidth availability and what the person is looking at. That's possible.
The wireless connection that the people in Cambridge were demonstrating was 25 megabits per second which is good enough for high definition television. That won't be available next year but I think there'll be some products comparable in speed to high speed modems as soon as the telecommunications deregulation happens. It will be possible for a company to start providing a wireless service just about straight away at 64 or 128 kilobits per second sort of speed. It is possible to get a higher speed than that in a point to point system already and you can get a license to do it now if you want to between two points.
There will be higher speeds coming but I think the interesting bit is that you would just overwhelm the reader with too much information. I think the interesting bit is to design software and systems which filter the information so that they get just what they wanted and it also happens that that is a small amount of bandwidth to consume as well. We'll see a lot more smarter applications than things like Netscape coming along fairly soon. I've forgotten the second part of the question now.
Krawczyk: Content versus, volume versus searching for real information.
Worthington: the issue of getting quality content came up in the book, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. At the time of the invention of the printing press they had the same problem. We had this new technology to produce lots of information and printers went out and grabbed any manuscript they could find and stuck it on the printing press and produced lots of copies and the consumer had this problem that they couldn't tell what was alchemy and what was science from the content. What evolved then were systems for dealing with that sort of issue and the same thing is happening on the Internet. Anybody can put on anything. Then you have the problem of finding quality and then organisations set up systems for rating material, whether it's rating it for its pornographic content or its academic excellence content or its news value. And then you will probably have people selling the ratings service. The information being freely available, what you buy is the pointers to the quality information. The Computer Society does that already with references to articles. So I think we will see that as a growth industry.
?, Department of Transport and Regional Development: I would like to further the question about aspects of content and where the Internet is going. Similar to many other industries like the printing industry, movie making, all that sort of thing, once the technology has been developed there is the technical infrastructure that is developed first and then there's the influx of people becoming involved in that form of technology that have different skills and capabilities. With Australia advancing as a leader in developing Internet products what are we doing about ensuring not just IT people but publishers and librarians and authors and all the other ranges of people that should be involved in producing products for the Internet becoming involved? That is something that I am seeing is not being done and I think should be done, the development of Internet products should be broadened outside of people that are generally considered in the mainstream IT industry.
Worthington: Well, the first thing we have and the one area that has not been exploited which I forgot to mention is our universities who built Australia's online infrastructure and helped explain to people like myself how to use it and how it worked. Those people are currently working out what online printing means, how to review, how to handle copyright issues, all of that is being considered by academics at universities for their own purposes as well as research topics to look at. There is a huge body of work there that is not being exploited by the commercial industry. I go to my local universities every now and then and sit in the backroom at their seminars and hear wonderful developments of what they are doing. That is the first place it is being sorted out, in those sorts of bodies.
Another area is in the meeting that I went to in the UK where we were looking at the issue between computer societies but what we had in the back of our minds was, if we work out how to do this we can then explain it to other disciplines and to the commercial industry, how to make use of it. And that can happen very quickly, it can only take a matter of days between ... We worked out this great way to do online publications before it's spread across the Internet and people are doing it. You're sitting next to someone who knows how to do this, by the way.
We could do with some more r&d on this. One problem we have is the definitions of information technology that our funding bodies use for handing out grants. This doesn't quite fit into the categories that they have. One of the things that I will be recommending is more flexibility to cover these sorts of things, and then we can have a broader range of developments. But yes, it's a problem.
D'Arcy: Gaze into your crystal ball and tell me where we are going to be at the end of 1997 when it comes to speed of access on the Internet and whether you think that during 1997 Canberra is going to make a major step towards achieving its promised goal of becoming the information capital of Australia.
Worthington: I'm not sure what the doubling time of the Internet is at the moment. That is how you measure it. Ten months, is it, now. So that it will just keep progressing at that rate. I should imagine that it will speed up a bit.
D'Arcy: What are we looking at it terms of speed? Are most people going to be stuck at 28.8 this time next year or are we going to see a dramatic improvement in access speeds?
Worthington: I don't think we will see a dramatic improvement. People will be able to buy things like cable modems and wireless connections with higher speeds but for the ordinary average person they will be using a 28.8 or a 33.6 modem. At the moment the limit isn't the speed of the modem anyway. It is the speed of the rest of the network. The modem isn't slowing down my connection, for example. I don't think we will see everybody with megabit per second links, no. There aren't the applications to support it and at the moment it would cost them too much to buy it.
D'Arcy: And what about Canberra. With the development that is taking place with information, and information and communications technology are we going to see a movement toward Canberra achieving its promise of being the Information Capital of Australia because it's certainly not at the moment.
Worthington: Not as far as I can see currently. We have implementations by government agencies of things like Web pages, we don't have that much else happening in the private sector, for example. Hopefully we will see developments in the media/entertainment industry happening from Sydney and Melbourne. That might overtake things. I don't think we are going to see a huge rush of developments in Canberra in terms of the Information Capital, as things stand at the moment.
D'Arcy: Thanks, Tom, for coming today. We hope that in 12 months time you might come back again and give us an overview of developments. On behalf of the National Press Club I would like to thank you for the assistance that you have provided us with such things as our first presence on the Web and that you will also be kind enough to provide us with assistance as we move toward the direct broadcast on the Internet of a number of Press Club luncheons next year. Compliments of the Season.
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