TheyWorkForYou.co.nz blog

Some bill submissions called for more quietly than others

The NZ Parliament website contains a section inviting submissions from the public to Select Committees on bills and other issues. I’ve noticed two bills before the Māori Affairs Committee have submissions due in August, yet are not currently listed in the submissions section.

The Parliament website declares that the Affiliate Te Arawa Iwi and Hapu Claims Settlement Bill and the Central North Island Forests Land Collective Settlement Bill both have a submissions due date of 1 August 2008. Yet neither bill is yet listed on the Parliament site’s submissions section.

The front page of TheyWorkForYou.co.nz lists bills open for submission based on the Parliament’s submissions list. Since that list is not always up-to-date, I’ll change my software to also include bills with a open submission due date declared on their page at the Parliament website.

[Update Fri 4 July 2008: The two bills I mentioned have now been added to the Parliament website’s submissions section. So now they also appear on the front page of TheyWorkForYou.co.nz while the submission period is active.]

Government’s New Zealand Digital Strategy lacks vision?

The government is asking us to comment on the most recent incarnation of their New Zealand Digital Strategy. You have until 12th May 2008 to submit a comment (The consultation period has been extended to 23rd May 2008). My gut feeling is that I’ll have more impact on NZ’s digital future by adding more features to TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, than by rehashing the wording of a strategy document.

We must ask ourselves why free open source software is not discussed in the government’s Digital Strategy. Is it that the government is addicted to a single proprietary software vendor? How much do they pay that vendor each year in proprietary software license fees? How does that affect NZ’s trade balance? What are the opportunity costs? These are all economic questions that you’d think the Ministry of Economic Development would be considering when evolving a strategy for the country.

I’m quite passionate about this whole area, as I imagine you are too if you’re reading this blog post. Have you made submissions on digital strategy drafts in the past? I have, and noticed my comments never made it into the reports themselves. Government, tell me why I should devote time to giving you free consulting yet again, when I’ve seen you overlook issues that you find uncomfortable or don’t understand?

The Ministry of Economic Development have added a new enabler of change to the strategy this time round: collaboration. Collaboration now sits alongside the enablers they’d identified in 2005: connection, confidence, and content. In a previous submission, I’d proposed software ‘code’ should be included as an enabler.

The strategy hardly mentions software, and free open source software is only referenced in passing during a side-bar case study. Software programmers are not mentioned at all. Imagine you wrote a creative media strategy that only talks about distribution companies and audiences, and failed to mention writers and their scripts?

We know that a restaurant requires chefs and recipes, alongside pots and pans, customers, and ingredients. Without chefs you might be able to run a fast food franchise, but that’s about it. In a similar vein, a successful digital ecology in New Zealand requires programmers and software code, alongside computer hardware, digital content and broadband.

The free open source software movement has shown you don’t need hierarchical command-and-control organisational structures to create value producing software. We know that business obtains value from free open source software. For example Linux, a popular open source operating system, is used in the operation of organisations such as Google and the New Zealand Stock Exchange. Linux has been authored by hundreds of developers world-wide, some employed to do so and some working voluntarily. If you’re wondering, the key difference from proprietary software is that Free Software code is held in a ‘commons’ allowing anyone to use, modify and re-release it.

My vision for New Zealand is that it adopts and leverages free open source software in communities, in government and in business. The proposition is that a virtuous economic cycle will emerge as less money is spent importing proprietary licenses from overseas. Instead that money is retained in the NZ economy for investment in digital service provision and innovation based on a free open source software infrastructure operated by local technical expertise.

Teach children to code with free open source software and you’ll see a flourishing digital future for New Zealand.

You can make a submission via the
New Zealand Digital Strategy website up until 5.00pm Friday 23 May 2008.

Vote results missing in www.parliament.nz HTML

Have you been wondering why not much development has been happening? Recently my time for the site has been exhausted in ensuring that the information taken from www.parliament.nz is correct and complete.

A frequent problem I’ve had to deal with is a missing vote result line in the HTML version of the parliamentary transcripts on www.parliament.nz. I try to keep Parliament notified of these omissions when I see them occur, in order for them to correct their site. However I’m hoping that the Hansard team within Parliament is going to be able to come up with a permanent internal solution to this reoccurring problem.

Here’s an example from a bill debate on 8th April 2008 where the vote result line is missing from Parliament’s HTML advance version:

The vote result line does exist in Parliament’s PDF version of the same bill debate, it reads “Bill read a third time.”:

Hopefully we’ll be seeing the end of this particular problem soon, which will leave more time available for new development on TheyWorkForYou.co.nz.

Talk about Creative Commons on World IP Day 26 April

The Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Economic Development and the Copyright Council of New Zealand are developing a plan to raise public awareness of copyright, patent and trademark issues during the last week of April leading up to World IP Day on 26 April (ANZAC Day).

They are keen to engage the education sector and national library networks in this endeavour. In the hopes of providing a level playing field for ideas in the area of copyright, I’ve just left a reply on the NZ librarians mailing list that I’d like to share with you:

“Each person on the Web has the potential to be a content creator. On World IP Day it would be great to educate people on how they can use Creative Commons licenses to waive certain rights associated with works they have produced, to allow others to share, remix and reuse their works legally.

For example, the photo website Flickr allows you to release your photos under Creative Commons licenses. There are already over 129,000 photos of New Zealand licensed under the Creative Commons.

Flickr is also experimenting with a Library of Congress Pilot Project to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the content of a publicly-held photography collection. Library of Congress photos are being released with “no known restrictions on publication”, meaning that the Library is unaware of any restrictions on the use of the images.

Sharing your work under your own terms can promote creativity and innovation. The Free Open Source Software movement has clearly proved this with the production of great applications, such as the FireFox browser, OpenOffice, and the Linux operating system. The software code of these applications is able to be shared, remixed and reused due to the authors licensing their work under Free Software compatible copyright licenses. Google and the New Zealand Stock Exchange are examples of organisations that run their infrastructure on Linux. People using Free Software as a model for producing innovation and value are definitely having positive real world business impact.

Further reading:
Creative Commons
Creative Commons NZ licenses
Flickr Creative Commons
Free Software Definition

Hope you share these stories with others on World IP Day!”

Networked Collaboration at BarcampUKGovWeb

Lloyd Davis of Perfect Path recorded me talking about networked collaboration at Saturday’s BarcampUKGovWeb in London. Here’s the edited video, thanks Lloyd!

The one day BarcampUKGovWeb event was primarily organised by Jeremy Gould, a civil servant who runs websites for a UK government department. The event brought together people engaged in Web activity within central government, the wider public sector, and interested participants from the non-profit and private sector, to share ideas and experiences. Google made their London offices available as a location for the event, and the International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy (ICELE) sponsored a yummy lunch.

In the morning I presented a few slides about Networked Democracy which sparked a discussion of ways online networking is increasing participation in offline democratic activity.

Jeremy told me he was inspired by the BarcampWellingtonNZegov event that was held last September in New Zealand. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Wellington Barcamp hadn’t in turn been inspired by the first KiwiFoo camp put together by Nat Torkington, Jenine Abarbanel and Russell Brown at the beginning of 2007. Thanks to everyone in NZ who made those events happen, which allowed the UK meeting to be considered viable by the UK government. Together through a continuous process of trial and error we are building through our global networked communities approaches to promoting the common interest.

Download: Networked Democracy presentation

Parliament on Rails presentation slides

In September I presented a technical overview of the TheyWorkForYou.co.nz project in a session at RailsConf Europe 2007 in Berlin. You can download the Parliament on Rails presentation slides as a PDF. The presentation outlined some of the current and future ideas related to the project. There’s also some code extracts that demonstrate the Ruby on Rails implementation behind the website.

All feedback I received on the RailsConf presentation has been positive; one comment on a blog went as far as saying “you walked out of there energized and ready to make the world a better place”. Speaking at conferences and events has proved a great way to share the vision of Web-based parliament transparency and public participation. Developers from Australia and Iceland have been in touch with me since RailsConf with enquiries about how to start similar projects to cover their parliaments.

For me the Africa on Rails presentation by Mike McKay was the most moving of RailsConf Europe 2007. Mike’s leading a team of local developers in Malawi to create a touchscreen application for real-time management of HIV patients’ medication records. The application is built using Linux and Rails - great to see the free open source software model benefiting people in this way.

Finally I’d like mention how impressed I was by the quantity and quality of the nominees and winners in the New Zealand Open Source Awards 2007. From London I was able to amuse myself one evening last week watching videos of the award ceremony from their website. Congratulations to all the organisers, nominees and winners!

Ruby on Rails Podcast about TheyWorkForYou.co.nz

Recently at several events in Europe, specifically in London (where I’m based), I’ve had an opportunity to share the story of the development of TheyWorkForYou.co.nz with others. On the blog this week I’ll have a series of short posts to update you on what’s been happening.

At a recent London Ruby User Group (LRUG) meetup, I was interviewed for a Ruby on Rails podcast by Seattle-based Geoffrey Grosenbach, who was passing through town for another event.

Download: Ruby on Rails podcast about TheyWorkForYou.co.nz [MP3 7.6 MB]

Geoffrey wrote the opensource Ruby sparklines generation library that I happen to use to create the graphs of NZ Parliament oral question activity over time. After showing Geoffrey on a laptop the use of sparklines on the site, he suggested we do a podcast about the project. I’d had an optimal one pint of lager by that stage and agreed to the interview!

During the interview I discuss the history of the project, including the early inspiration from UK’s TheyWorkForYou.com, I delve into some technical details, and acknowledge that one of the activist agendas for the site is to promote free open source software (you knew that already, right?). At end of the interview I point out that “this thing is happening globally”, that volunteers and non-profits are helping people track what’s going on in governments all over the world, and that “we are really positively motivated and hopefully we will create some positive change”.