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.
Posts for: #Government
Open the DOC Preliminary Reports
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.
Radio NZ National: Transparency
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.