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.

“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:

1. Nine to Noon
2. InternetNZ New Councilor indoctrination^Wintroduction
3. Silverstripe catchup (I’m on their advisory board)
4. Evensong at St Pauls (loves me the choral music)
5. Meet Clare Curran
6. LIAC meeting all day Friday

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.

Listen to my 2 July 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about emotional robots, Kiwi web awards, and a new US government transparency web site.

Below are my notes. I prepare a small essay on the subjects I’m talking about because it helps me get my thoughts straight. We often deviate from the topic of my notes (as we did today with the long sidetrack into artificial intelligence). I look at my notes as where the conversation starts, not where it stops.

Glen Barnes and I have softlaunched opengovt.org.nz, an effort to do some MySociety-style projects for New Zealand. Glen’s built a catalog for open government data, and there’s a mailing list on which we’re discussing the next project.

I’ve grown a row of beetroot and now I’m nervously wondering what the hell one does with a row of beetroot. I asked on Twitter, and here are the first 90m or so of responses:

@annaraven: http://bit.ly/G77RQ

@nzfi: @vexus_nexus similar effect on no# 2s too - tho don’t think it is a gene thing (omg can’t believe I’m tweeting this).

@nzfi: oh & don’t forget that the leaves are really yummy too. Chop, Steam, season & drizzle w olive oil. (Can u tell I like beets a lot?!).

I sent this to Minister Worth (in his Internal Affairs role) and Laurence Millar (as Government CIO) today because they both have a desire to see more open government information. Posted FYI, and I’ll update with any responses I get.

Department of Conservation do a good thing by putting preliminary reports online. However, there’s no mention of license and when poked, everything’s under Crown Copyright and permission must be sought for use. A critical element of putting things online is clarifying the use that can be made of them and a critical element of open government information is removing the permission request cycle.

This talk looks to be interesting:

Since intellectual property law’s beginning competing interests have stretched the law. Barbie now has more protection against rip-offs than Renoir could have imagined. A mishmash of justifications, including encouraging creativity and developing culture, has shaped the law. Does protection unduly restrict other cultural values? Susy Frankel will discuss the use and misuse of justifications in the law’s development.

Susy is current chair of the Copyright Tribunal and professor of law at Victoria University of Wellington. Wellington’s going to be quite the place to be on Tuesday, with Shelley Bernstein’s lecture just before Susy’s. Perhaps someone’s heard my wish for intelligent NZ public lectures on copyright.

The New York Public Library and Wired Magazine have collaborated to bring a set of evening lectures on how new technology is changing the economics of art with speakers Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Johnson, and the dude who did the Obama poster. I’d love to see something similar in New Zealand: Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington, all with a few tech-literate artists, academics, journalists, etc. telling it how it is.

There hasn’t been a lot of action from the new Government on broadband (or anything, really, yet) but this Economist article is food for thought about spending priorities:

When it comes to promoting economic activity, it is easy to see why having broadband is better than not having it, but most benefits are likely to come from wiring people up in the first place rather than making existing connections hum faster. In Japan and South Korea over 40% of households have fibre links capable of blazing speeds, but that does not seem to have resulted in more rapid economic growth, or the emergence of new applications unavailable to consumers with ordinary broadband.