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.

I’m excited, I’m going to be at the 2009 GOVIS conference on Government and IT. I’m closing the event out on Friday May 22, but also running two workshops before it opens: Work With The Web, Not Against It and Planning for 2012. The conference happens in Wellington, 20-22 May.

Ever seen a web site with absolutely hideous URLs? You know the ones I mean–they can’t be read by humans, they’re longer than one line in email, they have ? in them and so on. These URLs make it hard for people to bookmark, share, and cite your web site. Why would you do that? Work With The Web, Not Against It covers these kind of epic fails in web sites. Five-step registration, miserable mobile experiences, failures building communities, …. I got a million of ’em, and I’ll be sharing them at this workshop.

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.

I’m going to be appearing regularly on Nine to Noon on National Radio Radio New Zealand National. I’m every other week, alternating with Colin Jackson. After the show airs, I’ll post my notes and a link to the audio. Here’s last week’s:

I’m going to talk about a few groups and websites working on keeping the government honest and useful.

I’ll talk about:

• “Rouge Archivist” Carl Malamud and his website http://public.resource.org. He was featured in Wired recently.
• MySociety and their projects, particularly They Work For You which has a NZ version, Fix My Street and What Do They Know. TWFY aims to make parliamentary record more useful. FMS lets you report potholes, graffiti, etc. WDTK lets people who make Freedom of Information Act requests share what they learn.
• The Economist article about these transparency projects which specifically singles out the local government portal of Missouri and the crowdsourcing project which hopes to get volunteers reading the proposal and build a database of where the money goes. Even a simple picture helps citizens (and journalists) make sense of what’s going on.

The show aired Feb 12, 2009, and is available as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files.

My OSCON talk on teaching kids to program is now available as an audio podcast on the ITC Conversations Network.

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.

The Telecommunications Carriers Forum have released a note to ISPs saying that while they’re working on a policy that will comply with S92A of the Copyright Act (“An Internet Service Provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer”), it’s not clear that the policy will be finished 28 days before the 28 Feb 2009 deadline when the law takes effect. As such, ISPs should formulate their own interim policy, just in case.