Reheating some likely old news — I have been poking around the government interwebs lately looking for potential sponsors for Wikimedia Australia’s GLAM-WIKI event. I was most interested to find on Multimedia Victoria’s site, something called the Collaborative Internet Innovation Fund (that’s “cIIF” — “see if” it works, kinda thing…). [And as a sidenote it’s fitting that MMV is practically the only government website I can think of that has pretty URLs.] Round 1 of funding has closed, but a second round will open in 2010. So you have lots of time to mull it over and check out what got up in Round 1.

So what’s it all about?

The program provides project-based funding to support early adopters of new technologies to undertake collaborative projects that develop new ways of working and solving problems.

[…]Whilst many individuals are already using new technologies and ‘web 2.0’ tools in their social lives, organisations do not always have the capital, collaborative networks, leadership or knowledge to take the ‘step change’ that is involved in innovating using the next generation of ICT.

cIIF will support leaders in Victoria to take a step-change now and ‘learn by doing’. The program will build capability for ICT-enabled innovation in the State, and generate information and models to support more widespread adoption of new technologies.

“Web 2.0 for enterprise”, anyone? Better yet — collaboration, internet… hmm, what could that be but open source?

Take this quick quiz to see if your big idea might fit in:

• Is it seeking to solve a problem, delivering a solution or creating a new way of working using ICT?
• Does it involve combining, managing, analysing or sharing large amounts of rich information or data in a more user friendly way?
• Are innovative, internet based technologies appropriate to tackling the problem or designing a solution?
• Is collaboration the answer? Are there drivers for organisations to work together to solve the problem, or a community of interest around a shared solution?
• Would your idea benefit from the involvement and contribution of others, such as your peers, clients, stakeholders or the public?

Interestingly they’re really serious about this “collaboration” biz — Program funding grants are available to support collaborative projects involving multiple parties. Projects which involve only a single organisation are not eligible. And it explicitly mentions mixing and matching government, community and business.

They also have a blog which should have news about the Round 1 successful applicants, which I will be waiting keenly to read about.

P.S. The NSW state government doesn’t even seem to have an ICT department, let alone something that might call itself “multimedia”. What’s up with that??