New South Wales is developing a strategy for better use of location information, which is nice. But the way that they're doing it is even nicer. It's starting out with crowd sourcing of ideas and an unconference to generate more ideas for uses and usability of geographic information.
Right now the website is full of some fairly dense policy language:
Across Australia and internationally, governments are increasingly developing high-level strategies for the management and use of spatial information, infrastructure and services. By improving coordination, access, sharing and usability of spatial information, such strategies realise the full potential of states’ significant investments in spatial information assets. A NSW Location Strategy will thus ensure alignment with best practice. More importantly, however, it will unlock the value of spatial information – for the benefit of both NSW Government and the broader community.
But the promising approach and the reference to the use of location information by both government agencies and the public during the Queensland floods tells me that they're going to try to break out of traditional approaches to developing information strategy and that they'll be supporting some pretty creative approaches to generating, sharing and using geographic info.
One to watch.
