Looks like NZ will get a CTO real soon now. It’s hard to avoid the word “debacle” in describing how it came about: a false start at making an appointment, a whiff of impropriety in the appointments process that resulted in a Ministerial demotion ….

This is a shame because there are very real reasons that NZ should be increasing its IT heft in Government. There’s the potential to do a lot of good at the intersection of IT and government: preventing blowouts, giving informed advice to the civil service, and being a trusted advisor to politicians. Other countries are tackling these problems, with and without a person whose job title is CTO.

I used LGOIMA, the local government equivalent of the Official Information Act, to request details on how much revenue Auckland City council and the Auckland-area collective geospatial body made from geodata sales. Today I got the PDF of their response. Neither Auckland City nor ALGGi have made much from the sales, and I suspect the opportunity cost of the paywalled data far exceeds all their revenue to date.

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.

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 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)

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.

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.