The chair of the 1998 Information Industry Outlook Conference (held Saturday 7 November at the ANU) will give a wrap-up of issues from the conference. The conference focused on the state of e-commerce and digital certificate infrastructure in Australia. In his closing address, Tom Worthington argues that Australia can cultivate a cultured high technology image to promote its information industries. The conference proceedings have been published by the Australian Computer Society and are available on-line.
The 1998 Information Industry Outlook Conference was hosted by the Canberra Branch of the Australian Computer Society. It was held on Saturday, 7 November 1998 at the Australian National University in Canberra. The conference proceedings were published on the Internet and on paper by the ACS. Presentations by most of the speakers are also available on-line. A discussion of issues from the conference is continuing on-line in the Link mailing list. This presentation is intended to give some highlights from the conference, some insights into its genesis and what may come after it.
The conference introduction says: "IO'98 has been launched as Australia's pre-eminent conference to lead the discussion on issues affecting the electronic commerce, information technology, computers, telecommunications, the Internet, web and digital broadcasting industries. Current policy debates and developments around the emergence of the "information economy" were explored." But where did these high sounding words come from?
There are 876 messages (2.1Mbytes not counting attachments) in my IO'98 electronic mail directory. The first message is dated 9 March 1998, to Peter Talty (then at the then Department of Primary Industries and Energy), with a draft outline of the conference.
The inspiration for the conference was DPIE's rural industry outlook conferences, held each year. Peter Talty suggested that there should be a corresponding conference for the IT industry. Rather than go through the complex business of bureaucratic support for the idea, I suggested the ACS Canberra Branch make it the theme of our 1998 annual branch conference. If successful on a small scale in 1998, it might be supported nationally next year.
The conference was to have two parallel themes, one to address the economic and policy issues and the other reporting new technology (to keep the technical people happy). It was timed to be after the Department of Communications and the Arts e-commerce summit in Canberra in April and before SEARCC'98 (and a possible federal election) in July.
In practice the second theme of new technology was dropped in favour of a policy oriented conference and was held later in the year, after the federal election.
To minimise the cost, effort and risk to the ACS, the same techniques used for the successful 1995 conference was adopted. Maximum use was made of on-line advertising, distribution of materials, receipt of papers and presentation on the day. There was no funding for speakers (particularly interstate ones). There is a low fee, intended to be enough to make delegates value the event, but not enough to discourage them.
In practice the on-line organisation and presentation was effective, but the promotion was not. In contrast to the 1995 conference which made a $8,000 profit, the 1998 event just broke even (NOTE: the version of this text used for the presentation incorrectly reported a $2,000 loss). There were also fewer delegates (70 v 90). It may be that the policy orientated theme and lack of technology focus did not appeal to mainstream IT professionals and particularly ACS members. The ACS received no government funding or external support for the conference and it had to be researched from members and delegates.
The ACS Canberra Branch Executive approved the conference proposal 11 March 1998. DIST were invited to have someone on the program committee, 18 March and David Williamson, then Deputy Leader, Information Industries and Online Taskforce, was nominated 22 March.
On 25 March I issued a request for an academic/researcher for the conference program committee, to give it some academic weight. On Peter Talty's suggestion we selected two: Dr David Lindley, School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University and Kate Reid, School of Law, University of Canberra.
One curious aspect of the call for volunteers and alter call for papers, was the number of late responses and the strong reactions from people who were told their response was too late. There appears to be a culture, particularly in the academic community, that such deadlines are always flexible and usually extended.
Continuing the chronology on 1 April I requested (and DIST agreed) that the wording "In Cooperation with the Department of Industry, Science and Tourism" and the DIST logo could be used on conference material (I copied the logo from the DIST home page).
A conference home page, was prepared. This evolved from an announcement, through call for papers, registration brochure, conference program to finally the proceedings. There was debate between the committee members as to if the conference would concentrate on e-commerce or be broader. It was decided to make the conference broad, but it turned out that the papers finally submitted and selected concentrated on e-commerce.
A call for papers was issued 5 June 1998. As well as a media release and being placed on-line, it was sent to academic publications and appeared in the journals of the ACM, IEEE and ISOC. The Australian newspaper also provided a free listing in its events column in each Tuesday newspaper, up to conference day.
The call for papers made some stringent stipulation's about proposals and papers: all proposals were to be submitted by e-mail; authors were to supply an e-mail address for comments from delegates; papers were to be submitted electronically and published on-line, as were presentations.
With the Call for papers issued, there followed a frustrating and at times bizarre period of several months of queries. In addition to the 13 proposals formally received, I had many odd e-mail messages and telephone calls. Several academics contacted me to volunteer for the program committee, well after the panel had been selected and took umbrage at being told they were too late. Several people wanted assurance (not given) that their proposal would be accepted before they would submit one. Several PR companies asked how much it would cost to guarantee their their clients would be selected.
Many people, despite being in the IT industry had difficulty understanding that the call for papers was on-line and that they had to submit their proposal on-line. One potential speaker questioned if electronic publications were recognised as formal academic publications.
Between seven and nine papers were required for the conference. The methodology to select them was to ask each committee member to rank the proposals in order of merit, with the best first. They then drew a line below those which were unacceptable. The results were then tabulated and there was found to be significant consensus. The top eight papers, which at least four people liked were selected.
There were no meeting of the program committee and the paper selection was carried out by e-mail. While the ranking process worked well it created a problem in explaining the reason for rejecting papers. Some applicants asked for detailed reasons as to why their papers were rejected; all that could be said was that they ranked below the cut-off point for papers selected.
Selected authors were advised 19 September and were given a deadline of 2 October for their draft paper. There were four presenters from the commercial sector (including three lawyers), two from the academic area and one from a Senator. Most papers were related to e-commerce. Disappointedly no one offered statistics on the state of the information industry in Australia (one of the themes of the conference).
The preliminary conference program, with abstracts of talks, speaker's biographies and photos were placed on-line 24 September. There was considerable difficulty in explaining to speakers why these details were needed so long before the conference and that the abstract they provided was being "published" on-line immediately.
The first two draft papers were made available to the committee for comment on 6 October, via a committee-only web site. A media releases were issued 16 October and 25 October. The first papers were released for public viewing 22 October, in an invitation to drinks with the speakers at the National press Club; the so called Internet Reality Check.
To avoid problems with incompatible computer based presentations and presenters who leave preparing a presentation to the last minute, all presenters were asked to submit their slides in Powerpoint v4 or HTML, a week before the conference. These were to be put on-line and made available to delegates. None of the speakers met the deadline for submitting slides for their presentations. However, almost all were submitted two days before the conference. Only two presentations had to be uploaded on the day.
The papers were published on-line, free to anyone, two weeks before the conference. The papers were quickly converted from the submitted RTF format to HTML for the web (with a standard conference background pattern, headers and footers added). The original RTF papers were also placed on-line, but the addresses of these were only provided to the committee for review purposes.
One week before the conference the RTF papers were converted to a common format and incorporated into one compound document to form the printed proceedings. The ACS National Office issued an ISBN for the proceedings and advised "Books in Print" of the pub location. This was printed on a laser printer using ordinary A4 paper and sent to a pint company for reproduction at B5 size. The newly standardised RTF versions of the papers were uploaded to the web site and publicly announced.
The presentations were divided into three sections: Addressing Risk in Electronic Commerce, Examples and Opportunities and Wider Issues. Also there was an opening keynote address and closing address.
While the themes were pre-planned, based on the conference papers submitted, some key issues emerged during the event:
The Mrs Kate Carnell MLA, ACT Chief Minister, (also Minister for IT & Multimedia) gave a passionate speech about the importance of IT to the ACT economy. She illustrated the significance of IT to business, particularly small business by using the example of the efficiencies computer systems can make in her own profession of pharmacy.
Dr David Williamson, Deputy Leader, Information Industries and Online Taskforce, Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, presented a brief overview of the report Stocktake of Australia's Information Industries .
This wasn't planned as part of the conference program. However, the then Department of Industry, Science and Tourism released the report on 20 October. But, it appears to have been largely overlooked, perhaps because of the reshuffle of federal portfolios (the Information Industries section moved from the industry portfolio to communications) and because the report is only available on-line in the user-unfriendly PDF format. I thought the report deserved some attention from the information industry.
The contents of the report deserve a detailed analysis, which is not possible now. It would form a useful topic for academic research.
Stephen Wilson, KPMG Certificate Authority in Sydney and one of Australia's foremost experts in digital certificates and public key infrastructure, argued that a lack of consensus over operation of public key authentication is holding up e-commerce in Australia. He was also the first speaker to mention trust, which became one of the themes of the conference:
It is widely accepted that the success of e-commerce depends on a trusted, open authentication framework, for without authentication, nobody can be sure of who or what they are dealing with over the networks. There is broad agreement amongst users, application developers, standards bodies and IT vendors that public key technology provides the best solution. A number of parties in Australia have been working to realise a Public Key Authentication Framework (PKAF), including the Commonwealth Attorney General, OGIT and Standards Australia. In the meantime, several commercial Certification Authorities have set up shop offering public key authentication services for a variety of purposes. Yet no high level consensus has yet been reached on the constitution and control of the PKAF.
Stephen made the clearest statements at the conference for changes to government policy. He argued that greater government involvement in the establishment of the PKAF was needed and that it was not a threat to personal privacy.
Adrian McCullagh from Gadens Lawyers argued that trust is a necessary but unfortunately misunderstood concept in e-commerce. Unfortunately, despite (or perhaps because of) his extensive and scholarly exploration of trust, I couldn't grasp the concept, apart from its everyday meaning and obvious need in transactions.
Anita Smith from Advantra Pty Ltd tried to answer the question of why isn’t Australia further down the road of success in electronic commerce, using examples, rather than research. She argued that legal uncertainties were not the primary cause of uncertainty and that perceived risks, rather than real ones were the problem.
Dr Ric Jentzsch from University of Canberra described what small to medium enterprises needed to do, in order to maintain the balance between the needs of business and exploiting the Internet: Operating in the global economy means that small to medium enterprises (SME) will need to be flexible in the way they conduct business and in their utilisation of information technology. The strategic competitive advantage of businesses is constantly under threat.
In what was for me the best talk of the conference, Peter Barnes, from University of South Australia described the success of BASS Online, as Australia's first on-line event ticket sales service. In contrast to other speakers, Peter talked from successful experience, rather than theory. He examined the positives and negatives of that experience to date, and relate them to national policy issues such as those being addressed by the National Office of the Information Economy in the areas of authentication, security and privacy.
Peter made a plea for simple on-line systems, which balance security with ease of use for the customer and attacked SET as being overly complex: My concern is that SET will add complexity to what is, for a lot of customers, already a complex process (that is logging onto the Internet, finding the Web site etc.) and will do nothing to improve the response times of the systems involved..
Vanessa Harvey argued that the information economy is the next wave of economic growth and set out to explain how Australia could enjoy the future prosperity that the information economy promises. She argues Australia is uniquely placed to develop an information economy around content provision. Unfortunately her brief extended abstract doesn't say quite how to do this.
Ross Kelso from the Centre for International Research on Communication and Information Technologies at RMIT University reported on a feasibility study for monitoring Australia's progress towards the effective use of on-line services. The prototype for monitoring information, across a number of key sectors (government services, business, education, health, residential and groups with special needs) was described. Unfortunately Ross didn't demonstrate the prototype.
Senator Kate Lundy, Federal Opposition IT Spokesperson, argued that the convergence with digital technology could reverse a trend of polarisation of the haves and have-nots: To do so will require brave political decisions, a willingness to invest in a sustainable future and above all, an articulate vision for humanity. The global nature of this challenge does not excuse national governments for treading softly.
While these were fine words no policy proposals were presented, nor was the opposition's lack of a coherent IT policy at the last election explained.
In my closing address (not one of the submitted papers), I argued that Australia can cultivate a cultured high technology image to promote its information industries. To illustrate where we go wrong, I talked about my experience in assisting with the discipline review strategy for information technology in Australia. The report was sound it terms of policy recommendations, but dull. This contrasts with the success I saw at Cambridge (England) on developing a high technology industry centre. Cambridge cultivates a cultured persona, which helps market its technical and intellectual products. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that economic development comes from growth of local companies and though technology transfer to multi-national companies. That process needs people and institutions with self confidence.
The 1998 Information Industry Outlook Conference was a success, in terms of the content presented and debate of Australian information industry policy fostered. Organisation of content and presentation using the Internet was very effective and efficient.
To be a financial success the conference may need to introduce more of a technology focus, to cater to the interests of people in the IT industry. There is a lack of research on the state of the Australian information industry. A contribution of $250,000 from the new Department of Communications, IT and the Arts (DCITA) for work to be reported at next year's conference would aid this and demonstrate the new department is not just the old department of communications, with a longer name. The Department may also consider creation of a Bureau of Communications and IT Economics, to carry out ongoing research, as operates in other industry sectors.
There one clear and important policy issues for government from the conference. The major consideration is for the federal government to reverse its current lase-fare policy on digital signatures and support the implementation of a legislatively backed scheme. The conference speakers presented views from a commercial and academic point of view in, at times, overly complex language. To make the message clear for government: Senator Alston must direct NOIE to implement PKAF, or risk the failure of e-commerce in Australia.
Less clear was action on privacy legislation, with differences of opinion between speakers on the need.
The clear message for industry was that simpler systems for e-commerce were required, which relied less on technology and ,more on traditional legal and other means to assure customer trust.
Tom Worthington is Special Adviser for Internet/Intranet Policy, with the Australian Department of Defence and Immediate Past President of the Australian Computer Society. Information Age magazine listed Mr. Worthington as one of the 10 most influential IT&T people in Australia in 1998, citing his work on national IT policy. His work since 1994 has been on the policy and practice of implement of the Internet, including appearances before three Senate hearings.