Ti Point Tork

Minister of Internal Affairs (pre)

October 14, 2009 – 9:33 am
I'm meeting the Minister of Internal Affairs for 20m today at 12.30. I want to talk with him about the Government's move to open data: what do they hope to achieve, what is he driving, and how can groups like Open New Zealand work with the Government on it. (And, implicitly, to learn where we'll be working against each other!) I'll post my notes at the end.

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Libraries, Health, and Internet

October 14, 2009 – 9:26 am
Not the solution to the world's problems, just my agenda this week. Mon-Wed was in Christchurch for the LIANZA conference. Wednesday night, a HISAC dinner. Thursday is a HISAC meeting, the last with the current membership. Friday is an InternetNZ council meeting.

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In Wellington Today

September 30, 2009 – 8:37 am
There's an InternetNZ strategy day for the council. I'm not a mad fan of strategy for strategy's sake, but Frank March (InternetNZ President) seems pretty keen to keep it practical. We'll be nailing down issues like: who InternetNZ represents, what types of projects we can support, how we work with other organisations, and a bunch of financial policies to keep InternetNZ from any of the financial crises that can befall poorly-run organisations (running out of money, being surprised by obligations, etc.). InternetNZ isn't about to run out of money, but before we start funding a new round of projects it seems wise to get the ducks in a row so that they're funded systematically and thoughtfully rather than spontaneously and piecemeal. InternetNZ's revenue comes from .nz domain name registrations, and also we'll be preparing the org for fluctuations in that business. In today's meeting, I'll be acting in accordance ...

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Wellington on a Good Day

September 23, 2009 – 12:57 pm
"You can't beat Wellington on a good day," say the Wellingtonians. Today is not that good day, however, and Wellington could be beaten like a red-headed stepchild. I'm in town Thursday and Friday. My agenda: Nine to Noon InternetNZ New Councilor indoctrination^Wintroduction Silverstripe catchup (I'm on their advisory board) Evensong at St Pauls (loves me the choral music) Meet Clare Curran LIAC meeting all day Friday

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InternetNZ: Censorware: Phone call

September 15, 2009 – 9:29 pm
(As a new councillor for InternetNZ, I will be pitching into the issues of copyright and censorship. I'll blog all my InternetNZ work to keep folks following along at home up with the play. I'll be walking the line between transparency and confidentiality, so I beg your forgiveness in advance if I don't always provide blow-by-blow who-said-what-to-whom accounts of meetings.) Today the members of the policy advisory group (PAG -- what a lovely acronym) looking into the DIA censorware had our first phone meeting. We went over arguments for and against the filter, and attempted to identify the philosophical principles on which a response to the filter could be made. I was struck by how useful David Farrar was: he's obviously spent a lot of time talking to people about this, and was able to play Devil's Advocate when needed. The InternetNZ staff will boil down what we said to ...

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Gov 2.0 Summit: Tom Steinberg

September 9, 2009 – 3:44 am
Tom Steinberg is my pioneer hero of open government. His group, MySociety, is a British non-profit building things on the web. His things work: fix rate for FixMyStreet is about 50%. That means 10s of thousands of real problems that will get fixed next year. He gave us some lessons that MySociety learned along the way. They're things to watch for in other people's projects. Lesson 1: Great gov2 project combine services that normal people care about (people who don't care about transparency) with transparency. People care about their roads. But you need transparency to get them the site they actually want. Lesson 2: First rule of Government Data Mashers Club is that you do not talk about Government Data Mashers Club in front of your users. Tom said he's a big fan of structured data, but we should be cautious about presenting a site ...

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Gov 2.0 Summit: Clay Shirky

September 9, 2009 – 3:37 am
Clay Shirky, clad in the world's shiniest shirt, was introduced as "The Oscar Wilde of the Internet" but that was doing him an injustice for Clay is a fantastic combination of thinker and public speaker. He entranced the audience. He gave two examples: Apps for Democracy vs the LA Times Wikitorial. Apps for Democracy was a success, the Wikitorial not. Wikitorial was Times putting editorial online and saying "improve this like Wikipedia does". It lead to: arguments, flamewars, spam, porn, goatse. He talked about social agreements by talking about a study of Israeli daycare pickup times and the effects of fining parents who were late to pick up kids: the rate of late pickups increased, and didn't return to normal after the fines went away. This is because fines broke the incomplete social agreement. The incentives of the market aren't something you can casually add to an existing ...

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Gov 2.0 Summit: Aneesh Chopra

September 9, 2009 – 3:27 am
Aneesh Chopra is the US Federal CTO. The conversation on stage between him and Tim O'Reilly began with an explanation of the role of the CTO vs that of the CIO (Vivek Kundra). The impression I got was that the CTO has a political role while the CIO is more independent. Mr Chopra spent his time on stage clutching a Starbucks coffee mug and telling stories about the use of technology in healthcare, medicine, and other areas. The big takeway for me was that while administrations change every four or eight years, your open government initiative doesn't have to die with the next regime. If you build something that citizens will get addicted to, the citizens won't let the pols break it.

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Gov 2.0 Summit: Clay Johnson

September 9, 2009 – 2:55 am
The second Clay, hairier and less well-dressed. Head of Sunlight Labs, part of the Sunlight Foundation. I was at his house on Monday night for a turkey cook-off between him and Chris DiBona of Google. Clay won, by the simple expedient of deep-frying his birds. Clay's a good Southerner. Apps for America, contest around data.gov. This is their second contest. (I apologise for not linking here, I'm blogging on the run at the conf--Google will find you the projects I mention here) Rule: any entry needs to be open source. OSI-approved license, just needs to be open source. Second rule: any feed from data.gov, even data.gov itself. Prizes: $10k first prize, $5k second, $2500 third. And a $2500 visualization special category, and ten honourable mentions at $500 apiece. 47 open source projects were created, most still being maintained. Local Spending: HTML5 geolocation to tell you what ...

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Nine to Noon: 12 August 2009

August 12, 2009 – 12:25 pm
I went through two telephones in this Colorado house and neither of them could hold onto the call. Now that's frustrating! Here's what I was going to speak about: I will talk about recent American software company acquisitions and what it tells us about the economy and the future direction of cloud computing. Then I'll tell you how to teach your kids to program. Links: FriendFeed acquired by Facebook (BusinessWeek), SpringSource acquired by VMWare (InfoWorld), Poison for Venture Capital (NY Times), the Scratch visual programming language. FriendFeed and Facebook Facebook's the biggest social network: more than 250m active users, with >120M logging on every day. They get a billion photos each month. It's huge. But a person might belong to plenty of other social networks: Twitter, MySpace, they might have their own blog or two, they put photos on Flickr, .... It's very easy to have a ...

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