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
Watch the future of government
SilverStripe recently attended and exhibited at GOVIS, a three day, IT sector conference for New Zealand government agencies. Our experience there reminded us why our government has such a hard time using the web innovatively.
SilverStripe staff were struck by the absence of a knowledge gap between speakers and delegates. In other words, public sector staff attending GOVIS were largely progressive and self-motivated individuals: not only were they aware of good trends and best practices to do with IT and the web, they were already pushing such ideas within their agencies. In fact, this made some speakers look like they were preaching to the converted on key topics like open data, web-based APIs, open source software, embracing standards, and enabling meaningful services and democratic process online.
0 Comments Tags: govis, video, government
Open Source Software taking off in government
I imagine Barry Polley expertly swinging a machete to clear a path in a dense Honduran jungle. If Barry's never cleared a path in a jungle, I'd be surprised. Because that's exactly what he's doing at the Ministry of Justice.
Barry has authored the Ministry of Justice Open Source Discussion Paper which was just released. It's a broad and deep document that talks about open source in general and talks about specifics of why the New Zealand Ministry of Justice needs to adopt open source strategies. (Full disclosure: I reviewed a draft of this paper and provided some small amount of feedback)
0 Comments Tags: open source, government, OSS
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
New Zealand E-Government Guidelines
at standards-schmandards.com
Peter Krantz has posted a summary of the NZ government's compliance with their new e-government guidlines. A few points have come out of this.
0 Comments Tags: egovernment, standards
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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