The World Computer Congress (WCC), in one year's time, will provide a boost in the arm for the Australian and near-shore ICT market. Last week I was asked to fill the position of Deputy Chairman, International Program Committee, which yesterday I accepted.

The role includes responsibility for coordinating the right commercial content into the right streams of the conference to marry the objectives of the academic content provided through the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).  In short, oversight into making the congress content relevant for the marketplace. 

From 2010 Longhaus will launch LTV as the master brand to host Longhaus' online digital strategy. Under the Longhaus Television master brand will sit different channels each streaming a subset of Longhaus developed research and programming.

LTV will continue to represent the company's founding drivers of bringing quality, transparency and tactility to ICT based research in Australia, with a long term goal of delivering up-to-the-minute data on key metrics and commentary on major market announcements in the Australia and near-shore region.

In order to underpin and support this digital strategy, Longhaus has increasingly developed its online presence to the point that we now attract a very competitive unique visitor base each consuming content for an average of over 8 minutes per visit. With multiple visits each month this already results in close to 1,000,000 site hits per year across various content channels.

It was always going to be a tough assignment and a large part of me is disappointed that the job is only half-done. As of today, we have received over 1,250 views of the 13 policies outlined on the Naked Chief blog in the last few weeks.

The areas of biggest interest were certainly ICT Strategy support for small business, Assigning an economic value to a digitally connected life, and Introducing LAMP into the secondary education curriculum. So for any budding policy writers out there consider that some free research.

But apart from the odd comment and a lot of retweets, the experiment has shown that meaningful ICT policy is either 1) hard to articulate, 2) of little interest to the industry, or 3) much simpler than we have tried to paint it to be. For that reason we have decided to park the 30 Blogs in 30 Days campaign.

Equitable industry-based funding in government budgets has always been a contentious issue. Close to the top of the industry winners are always mining, agriculture, and manufacturing. And much of the budget funding that goes to support these industries is significant investments in ports, rail and harbour-facilities to enable the import and export of primary and secondary industry ouputs. These facilities are infrastructure beacons that can be irrevocably linked to their industry. They provide an unmistakeable sense of importance, significance and tactile and tangible measurements: job creation, physical exports, investment attraction, and international gateways.

The economic value of a human life is often used in public policy decision making. It is regularly used to determine the viability of mega-infrastructure projects such as highway upgrades through notorious black-spots, or tunnels to fight traffic congestion. That is, if a particular stretch of the Pacific Highway is regularly responsible (or the site of) multiple fatalities in a given year then it is a relatively straight forward calculation to determine the payback period. This would be estimated based on an economic value of Joe Citizen calculated as a formula involving life expectancy, earning capacity, net present values, discount rates, and various other economic instruments. The basic point is that human life is captialised in a trade-off against infrastructure cost.