New Zealand Progress
Source: IN Development Blog, State Services Commission, New Zealand
Listen Online: Perspectives on Open Data Workshop
The New Zealand Government continues to work towards the goals of the Open Government Information and Data Re-use Project of the State Services Commission.
The first stage was initiated during December 2008 with the publication of the New Zealand State Services Commissioned background paper (V1), ‘Promoting Government Information and Data Re-use’. The paper summarises the New Zealand government information environment and initiatives in the context of international policies and initiatives. It proposed a programme of working with suppliers and user of government information and data to enable and promote its re-use. The outcome will be an approach for opening up New Zealand’s public information and data and a report on the impact of this approach on the Policy Frame work for Government Held Information.
The opening comment in this paper invites participation:
“We want to work together with suppliers and users of non-personal government information and with people who use it now or wish to re-use it to create new information or products. We want to understand any issues you are facing. Opening up access to this non-personal government information and data is expected to create value for the New Zealand economy and increase our social and cultural well being.”
Listen Online to What was Said
More recently, the ‘Perspectives on Open Data: Workshop on the Re-use of Government-held Non-personal Data’ was held on the 18 February 2009 hosted by the New Zealand State Services. Workshop discussions are documented on the In Development Blog, hosted by the State Services Commission, New Zealand. The discussions were broad and covered policy and technical issues. The interactive workshop included presentations of the Strategy and Innovation Team (GCIO), followed by expert panel commentary and questions from the audience.
Five expert panellists
Runs KiwiFoo camp, an “un-conference” mixing up artists, business people, programmers, people from the political scene etc. Spent 10 years in the US having run New Zealand’s first web server. Consultant on open source and the web.
Head of Digital Media at National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK. Looking at data mining, data visualisation, syndicating content more widely (platforms like Commons on Flickr), crowd-sourcing science information (“citizen science”).
Author of books on collective intelligence and data mining and practical use of semantic web technologies. Works for MetaWeb on their Freebase product, taking and integrating datasets from US agencies such as the Securities Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration.
Journalist, computer programmer based in Chicago. Works with news organisations, bringing government data online, creating works of journalism around it. Runs everyblock.com: local news at the address level (city municipal level) tapping into “a ton of public records”.
Employed by SixApart working on technologies, products and policy to enable people to control their data: use existing accounts more widely, take profile information, relationships etc. with them.
On the In Development Blog report of this workshop, it is possible to listen online to the audio recordings of the speakers’ presentations and read the audiences questions and the responses to these.
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