Adelaide Greenies calendar has moved

The Adelaide Greenies calendar has moved to a permanent home on Google Sites:

http://sites.google.com/site/adelaidegreeniescalendar

As a mild inconvenience, the addresses of the calendar subscriptions have changed. The old addresses will be phased out at the end of February, but the new addresses are available right now. See the How To Subscribe page for more information. The links in the sidebar of this blog have already been updated.
I hope people are finding this useful. It's certainly helping me keep track of what's happening. As ever, all feedback is welcome.

The Great Australian Internet Blackout

This blog is supporting The Great Australian Internet Blackout.

From the link: "The Great Australian Internet Blackout is a combined online and offline demonstration against imposed online censorship. We’re collaborating with Electronic Frontiers Australia to make sure every Australian knows why this draconian policy is unacceptable."

This blog will be in a black theme throughout the protest, until 29 January 2010.

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During a recent GetUp campaign against ISP-level internet filtering, I wrote the following email to Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Communications, and a slightly reworded version to the Shadow Minister, Tony Smith. Feel free to use it as a template, or visit the GetUp web site for more information:

Subject: Withdraw the government's plans for mandatory censorship of the internet

Dear Senator Conroy,

I am outraged at the government's continued efforts to impose a mandatory ISP-level filter on internet content.

I spent six years conducting research into computer security for the Department of Defence, and in my expert opinion, I do not believe that either a blacklist or a filter is an appropriate or effective measure, let alone both together. Both measures have unacceptable levels of false-positives and false-negatives, meaning that valid content will be blocked and restricted content will still be viewable. It is technically impossible to get the balance right, and it is also impossible to perform this filtering without a serious degradation of performance. Software to circumvent both blacklisting and filtering is already readily available.

Furthermore, I simply do not believe that it is the government's role to decide what content is appropriate or inappropriate for Australians to be allowed to view. The argument for child welfare does nothing either to explain or excuse a blanket ban on non-approved content that also affects law-abiding adults. Many child welfare groups also disagree with this scheme.

There is a question of trust that has simply not been addressed. The government's public consultation process simply omits the question of whether to have a mandatory restriction, as if this had already been decided and that the politics are being fixed around this decision. True to form, the government reserves the right not to publish submissions to this supposedly public process. There is nothing to suggest that a blacklist or content filter would not be expanded in the future - to block dissenting political voices or to expose government secrecy, for example - without any form of public consultation.

This scheme is not without viable alternatives either. A far more workable solution would be for parents to monitor their children's on-line behaviour and to protect them from explicit content as they see fit. A recent Galaxy poll states that 86% of Australians would prefer a parent to be deciding on what children should be allowed to do on-line. A current poll on the Sydney Morning Herald web site shows that 95% of Australians oppose a mandatory filter (13822 votes at the time of writing). Yet, the government continues to strive against the public interest.

We in Australia often criticise countries such as China and Iran, citing restrictions on internet use as evidence of government oppression. The fact that Australia is considering comparable measures means we have no moral ground in this argument. The scheme is unfair, opaque and unworkable.

Senator, I urge the government to withdraw this scheme immediately.

Yours sincerely,

Aaron Nielsen

Adelaide, South Australia

HSA delay

Happy New Year to you all. This has been a busy time for me, but hopefully, things will be calming down over the next couple of weeks.

As some people know from meeting me in real life, I have taken a course to become a Home Sustainability Assessor, under the Australian government's Green Loans programme to help householders become more energy- and water-efficient. The process of becoming a HSA has taken longer than I expected, not least of which due to the fact that the police records office, despite my explicit forwarding instructions, sent the certificate of my police check to my home address while I was on holidays. However, with that minor setback behind me, I was set to register with ABSA and get started.

On Friday afternoon, I got a troubling email from Alison Carmichael, CEO of ABSA, some of which I will republish here:

When the Green Loans program and the Home Sustainability Assessment Scheme were set up in the first half of 2009 both DEWHA and ABSA thought the program would be a success if there were 2000 people working by the end of the first year. It has certainly been extremely well received by both assessors and householders, surpassing all expectations.

To help manage assessor numbers ABSA announced to the industry in early November that new applications would only be accepted until 21 January 2010 from those candidates who had completed their training by December 24, 2009.

This action did not have the intended effect of limiting the number of applicants to a sustainable level. Unfortunately the program had been so extensively promoted by third party organizations that ABSA received a large number of applications before, during and after Christmas, the result being that ABSA is now holding over 5,000 new applications awaiting processing.

As each application must be checked individually, ABSA is having great difficulty processing these applications on a timely basis. The administrative load is such that we have also found it very difficult to respond to personal communications from our existing members and applicants and so, if you have had difficulty contacting us during this time, we apologise.

ABSA recognizes that all those applicants who are awaiting processing have already spent money on training and professional indemnity insurance, but it seems counterproductive for ABSA to accept applications and take further fees from a large number of people when there is no guarantee or assurance of any particular volume of work under the Green Loans program.

For this reason we are offering you the opportunity to withdraw your application before we take payment. You may do this by e-mailing ABSA on [withheld]. To ensure we can match the information, be sure to use the same e-mail address you have supplied us with for our database. ABSA will then return your complete application (including application fee) by mail on a priority basis.

If, given the information above, you still wish to proceed with your application please send an email from this email address to [withheld]

In this instance the program may still end but you will have been admitted as a member of ABSA and therefore eligible to receive ongoing communications from us about emerging programs in this new industry sector. You can expect to receive your assessor number within 3 weeks of your email response.

I wonder how many people were as disillusioned as I was to read this. The impression that I got was that ABSA expects its applicants might just give up the lot because of the impending glut of registered assessors. However, most of us have invested a great deal of time and many thousands of dollars to join the assessor scheme, and I imagine that very few of us would be willing to write that off in one fell swoop. The aforementioned email will reduce the number of outstanding applications, but not necessarily by a significant amount.

One wonders what will happen next. With so many new assessors in the field, the pool of funding for household assessments will dry up pretty quickly for those of us just getting started, and it will be years before new assessors are required. It also bodes badly for the rumours of additional training for existing assessors being funded in the future; suddenly, that costs five times as much as they expected a year ago.

It would be a shame, though, for the programme to be put on hold because of this development. It is clear that the "green collar" job market has no shortage of interest from the general public, even among those without formal training in this area (the HSA course had no prerequisites for training or education); to that end, we might see more such programmes in the future.

That said, the federal government doesn't have the best record when it comes to the environment. The real damage would be not just to see the HSAS wither because of a lack of funding but to see it used as an excuse not to fund other programmes. It wouldn't be the first time a government initiative was cancelled because it was too successful, but in an election year, anything could happen - and nothing could happen.

Video: "Franco's permablitz"

Now that we've got Franco's place under control, it's time to put the video up. There was a lot of material there, shot over three afternoons, but I did manage to get the whole thing to fit just under YouTube's 10-minute limit. Enjoy!



YouTube link: "Franco's permablitz - October/November 2009"

Adelaide Greenies calendar - an update

In the few weeks since I launched the Adelaide Greenies calendar, I've received a large amount of feedback. Thankfully, most of this feedback has been positive. I thought I'd write about it again, just to clear up a few questions that people may have.

How can people read it?

While putting "Adelaide greenies" into Google presents the calendar as the #1 hit, and my original blog entry about it at #3, it doesn't really have a home. I have added links to my blog to the different ways of viewing the calendar (HTML, XML, ICS), as well as a little embedded widget with some of the upcoming events. I think that's good enough for now. Of course, you should feel free to share these links with others and add these links to your own page if you find them handy.

Incidentally, I don't have a problem with people adding the calendar to their own sites. The HTML version of the calendar is the easiest one to link to, and the XML version is the easiest one to embed in WordPress sites (the PEZ site already includes it). Google Calendar does have an application that can help you create widgets for your own web page, like the HTML version or the list version on my blog. However, the application is only available to people who have full access to the calendar, so for now, you have to ask me for help with that. This brings me to my next question.

How can people add or change events?

At the moment, I'm the only person with full access to the calendar, so nobody can change it but me. This hasn't been a problem so far, since people haven't minded just sending me the occasional bit of news, so it hasn't been a huge task to keep the calendar up to date.

(As an aside, I would appreciate it if people gave an approximate finishing time for their events. Sometimes, I will already know, or at least be able to take an educated guess based on the type of event. The starting time is usually the more important, though. If I've taken a guess at an end time and got it hopelessly wrong, let me know!)

In the future, this will likely be a bigger job, and I will ultimately have to let other people in. There are two ways to do this: either give certain people full access to the calendar, or give certain people their own calendars. I think this caused a bit of confusion when I first launched the Adelaide Greenies calendar, so I'll explain in a bit more detail.

When I refer to a "calendar", I simply mean a sequence of events. At the moment, there's only one of these. What I had originally envisioned was that the individual groups around Adelaide might prefer to run their own calendars and manage their own events. For example, The Food Forest could just run a calendar of events hosted there, SCNPSP could list their community group meetings, and PEZ could list their workshops.

In case you were wondering, the HTML widget to display Google Calendar can handle several different sets of events on a single timeline. I've attached a picture to show the HTML widget with two calendars: the Adelaide Greenies calendar in green, and Australian public holidays in red. (I don't manage the latter; Google Calendar suggested it to me.) If you've got a dedicated calendar application on your computer - such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Lightning/Sunbird, or Apple iCal - it can already display multiple calendars simultaneously, as it typically would if you have separate personal and work calendars.


This would make things easier to manage, but it would also make things harder to find. Part of the goal of this exercise - and, indeed, a common theme among Transition Towns people in South Australia - is the coupling of the existing organisations, and splitting things up this way might not be as useful, since we haven't got a central directory of all things eco-friendly (yet) that would bring them all together and let people find them all in one easy trip.

There is another reason why the single calendar might not go away any time soon. As was very insightfully pointed out to me, even if there were separate calendars for separate groups, there might be events that don't fit them. Perhaps an event is organised by a group that doesn't have its own calendar yet, or perhaps the event is organised by several groups and no one of them really owns it. In such an occurrence, a single central calendar would still be useful, even if others exist.

For now, I'm happy to keep the one big calendar in place. That said, if anyone wants to know more of the details, would like to help edit the calendar, or would like to start their own, let me know. I'm still the gatekeeper, but I don't have to be the only one.

Which events should be there? Which shouldn't?

I got a question about whether there are boundaries or criteria to determine if there are certain types of events that shouldn't be included. I haven't thought too much about this, because for every event that I've seen so far, I've always known someone (or known of someone) who'd be interested.

That said, there might be closed events or minor things that people don't want publicised too broadly. Other events might be seen as off-topic; for example, I'm on a mailing list where some participants equate the response to 9/11 to a response to peak oil, but others take no interest. There might also be events or groups that not everyone wants to endorse - just as I've seen reputable journalism sites carry articles by climate change sceptics in the interests of balance but without vouching for their arguments.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what might exclude something from the calendar? What boundaries should be set? Are there certain things we should all be interested in and certain things about which we are neutral? Are certain issues off-topic? Remember, though, that we don't all have to believe in the same things for them to be relevant.

What personal information should be published?

Another issue that I'll bring up at the same time is privacy. People often host events at their own homes, and I've been hesitant to list private addresses in a public forum without permission. This isn't as much of an issue with our existing mailing lists, since they're usually closed-circle.

My policy so far is that you can list an address or you can say it's at someone's home, but not both. Phone numbers are OK, but I've been disguising email addresses in an attempt to stop spammers from harvesting them. What do people think of that policy? Similarly, please contact me if you would like any personal information added or removed.

Finally...

Couldn't you have come up with a better name?

I've never wanted to spend too long on the name, and this blog entry is no exception. Not everyone appreciates the label "greenies", but in truth, there isn't really a convenient term for everything that's going on that conveys that level of meaning.

There isn't a prize for coming up with a better name, but don't let that stop you having ideas about it. If all else fails, we can just call it Transition like everything else. :)

I hope that's cleared things up. Tell me your thoughts.