Posts By Susan Carchedi

Engaging New Zealand: More Than Government Talking to Government

Truth is a point of view, but authenticity can’t be faked. Peter Gruber One of the challenges that we have in New Zealand – like so many other places – is how government engages with people. The intentions are good: public servants are genuinely interested in creating policy and implementing processes that work well forRead… Read more »

GovHack: Hacking to make Government better in New Zealand

Last weekend, New Zealand joined Australia for GovHack 2015. If you’re not familiar with the idea, this is a 2-day hackathon set up for people – community, industry, academia, civil society and public sector  − to get creative with government data. The goal is to build some ‘thing’ using open government data. To be clear: this isRead… Read more »

Collaboration, Not Enforcement in New Zealand

Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed increasing references to government agencies as enablers rather than enforcers or regulators. I think that this is a side effect of 2 ideas that are gaining acceptance: the shift in the public sector to focus on trust rather than compliance seeing the public sector as an inter-connected systemRead… Read more »

The Future of Libraries: DigitalNZ is Leading the Way

Change is scary When the internet started to hit critical mass in the late 1990s / early 2000s, there were dire stories about how libraries would go the way of dinosaurs, with the expectation that books would be deliberately destroyed like a Fahrenheit 451 dystopia or tossed in a landfill somewhere to moulder quietly. MoreRead… Read more »

New Zealand: Finding the Balance Between Privacy and Data

Good: Big data. The Cloud. Information economy. Internet of Things. Medical advances. Engaged citizens. Crowdfunding. 3D printing. Crowdsourcing. Co-creation. Co-production. Open source. Open government. Smart cars. Bad: Identity theft. Big Brother. Phishing. Spyware. Malware. Spam. Zombie computers. Key logging. Hackers. Pharming. 419s . Social isolation. Marginalization. Privacy breaches. SkyNet. Sorry about that last one –Read… Read more »

New Zealand’s Govt.nz: What We Did Right

In earlier blog posts, I mentioned Govt.nz, which is the New Zealand Government’s flagship website. The new website was launched in July 2014 but things didn’t actually stop there. That requires a little explanation: we launched a minimal viable product or MVP. If you Google that term, you’ll get either a definition that includes return-on-investmentRead… Read more »

Thoughts from New Zealand: Does Open Source Lead to Open Society?

The set up Last week I want to a conference called Open Source // Open Society (OS//OS). While conferences are great opportunities to learn new things, I normally wouldn’t blog about one. But this one got me thinking about the ‘open society’ aspect and how it fits with government, especially with the work my team isRead… Read more »