I had a good time a few weeks ago with Russell Brown, Vaughn Davis, and Ms Behaviour talking about social media on the Media 7 show. You can watch it online.

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.

NZICT is an industry lobby group, representing the NZ ICT industry (software, hardware, services, networks, education, and training). They’ve just released a “Near Future Digital Priorities” paper. Here are my first thoughts.

1. First, I have to applaud the industry getting together to try and figure out how it can help the rest of NZ grow. The most exciting conversation at the short-lived Digital Development Council was when agriculture and manufacturing and other industries had an honest conversation with representatives of the ICT industry without being sidetracked into the failures or benefits of particular products or vendors.

Just a heads-up: over on the O’Reilly Radar blog, I posted about the opportunities for businesses in the future based on Stephen O’Grady’s predictions for 2010.

Citing growth in photo-sharing and social media sites, Telecom have announced they won’t charge for upstream traffic. That is to say, upload photos and movies all you like until the end of January when such traffic counts again toward your monthly bill. I’ve long believed that symmetric bandwidth is critical if we don’t want to be a nation of passive consumers, so I’m chuffed to see a big telco support this. Fingers crossed for my ISP, Orcon, to do the same!

If you’re in Wellington on the week of October 19, check out Victoria University’s Open Access events. There are a pile of events and talks planned on the campus for that week as part of International Open Access Week. Check it out on the Creative Commons New Zealand page for the week.

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.

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.

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.).

“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