SilverStripe.com Blog
Unlock Government data! SilverStripe sponsors the Open Government Data Barcamp
At the end of August New Zealand's first Open Government Data Barcamp will take place at the National Library in Wellington. The barcamp is an open, participant driven event organised and run by people who have an interest in making government-held data freely available.
As an open source company and one of the sponsors of the event, SilverStripe strongly stands behind the open data philosophy. We believe that collaboration fosters innovation and that taxpayer-funded data should be available without restrictions over the Internet. While data itself can do a lot of things, it needs to be put into context to be useful for others; having data freely available allows people to create value and develop innovative services and applications.
Government agencies, as part of their work, collect a substantial amount of non-personal data - from geospatial and environmental data to statistics. In most cases public money is spent to research and obtain this data, so it should be accessible for everyone to use.
SilverStripe works with a range of government agencies helping them to make their data available for citizens in a meaningful way, enabling them to collaborate constructively and make use of the data on a personal, regional, and national level.
0 Comments Tags: open data, government, barcamp, New Zealand
Agile Barcamp Success
The dust has settled, but we're still buzzing from the Agile Barcamp in Wellington on 7 December. This was a contributor-organised all-day conference held in the gorgeous office space at the top of the Deloitte building in the CBD. At the previous E-government Barcamp one of the recurring topics was agile development and project management methods. Some of us who attended thought it would be a good idea to organise another barcamp focused on agile so we could more deeply explore some topics that were hinted at during the e-govt barcamp.
Some attributes of a barcamp are that it's not commercial (there were some generous sponsors who covered costs of food and t-shirts but attendance was free) nor polished in a traditional conference sense, and that it relies heavily on interaction betweent the presenters and attendees. There is no schedule of talks until the day of the event when people who want to speak put a yellow sticky up on a big sheet of paper, indicating where, when, and what they want to talk about. Sounds like it won't work, right? It actually works surprisingly well. It also gives people who roll up on the day a chance to present. That's a key point.
0 Comments Tags: agile, barcamp, event, speaking
Barcamp Wellington
Last Saturday I (Brian) went to the NZ egov barcamp here in Wellington. It was a wonderfully informal event attended by about 80 or so of the New Zealand website creation crowd and government representatives who care about how government websites get built.
I gave a talk on the RFP process, while others spoke about Agile techniques, microformats, identity management, open source issues in government, accessibility, multi-output rendering based on single document source, risk management theory and practice, and more. Here's a mindmap of many of the ideas presented.
0 Comments Tags: barcamp, wellington, event, speaking, egovernment
How do humans win?
Webstock is here! We've been in heads-down mode for a while, working on sites for councils, Air New Zealand, and American clients too. So now is the time to celebrate the local scene and be proud of Webstock!
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