Spatial Information: New Zealand steps up!

Good evening, The Hon Maurice Williamson – Minister for Land Information; Colin MacDonald – Chief Executive of Land Information New Zealand; Steve Critchlow – Chairman of the Spatial Industries Business Association of New Zealand, Ladies and Gentlemen.

I am very pleased to be here at the launch of the ACIL Tasman report on the economic contribution of spatial information.  This is an important area – along with metadata – which is close to my heart – and an area that I think will contribute significantly to transforming how government interacts with and serves citizens all over the world.

Spatial data is an extremely important, but often overlooked component in modern services delivery, collaboration tools and archival. I’ll briefly touch on each of these areas as but a few demonstrable examples of the usefullness of spatial data.

Spatial data contributes to services delivery by helping facilitate a user-centric, or in the case of government, a citizen-centric delivery of information and services. A citizen’s location is a simple and relatively anonymous identifier through which the most appropriate local services, such as the local Council or medical facilities can be presented.

Collecting and sharing spatial data across agencies helps with consolidating and correlating projects both externally and internally, which means government agencies across the spheres of government can be better informed about other agency projects, and areas of potential collaboration.

In relation to archival, collecting and maintaining geospatial metadata of data and projects – whether that be the location of authorship or the various geocoded information therein – is vital for ensuring future probity as well as the geographical context of the information.

When you consider the value of historical records combined with modern Web 2.0 mapping mashup tools, this becomes extremely important for research, learning and for citizens to engage in their own communities and their own histories.

Open access to spatial data is important, particularly as open standards and with permissive copyright conditions as this provides opportunities for innovation across the public and private sectors.

• Private innovation – Australian companies can value-add to government spatial data and create opportunities for themselves and the Australian economy. The value proposition and competitive advantage becomes how data is presented, collated, and delivered in useful ways, rather than the data itself.
• Public innovation – there are many communities of interest and even individuals who can leverage publicly available data to create useful services. For example there is a new website called TweetMP looking at how many Australian politicians use Twitter. People can put their postcode in and see whether your local member is Tweeting. Or OpenStreetMaps, a community initiative providing street map data which is then used by many community driven projects such as translated maps, as well as some high profile use cases, such as for the Obama administration.

Government has several responsibilities in this area;

• To ensure open access to government owned spatial data for public and private innovation;
• To ensure appropriate spatial data is captured for government projects and data;
• To understand how it can support this rapidly growing industry;
• To collaborate with both public and private interests to ensure spatial data helps citizens;
• To engage in spatially enabled Gov 2.0 initiatives to both improve government services, and to encourage industry development in this area.

So what is happening in Australia? In Australia we have some incredible Gov 2.0 initiatives which are strongly leveraging spatial data:

• The Australian Government Economic Stimulus Plan website. Citizens can find projects in their local area .
• Mapping our ANZACs, an initiative of the national Archive of Australia which allows members of the public to populate the site with their memories.
• The Office of Spatial Data Management (OSDM) has made made data sets freely available. Their recent Spatial@Gov conference has a fantastic array of case studies in Australia which you can read on their websitel. One of their projects is the “Interoperability demonstration” which shows many example data sets on a map that can we switched on and off for easy information browsing. In September the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA) will be running their annual conference, which should be interesting.
• In October Australia is hosting the global Free and Open Source Software for GeoSpatial conference (FOSS4G) which is a 4 day conference with some of the most innovative people from around the world in this space, and it would be well worth attending.
• I also want to briefly point out the importance of the industry/government action agenda established in 2001 in Australia. The action agenda was an important step towards developing Australia’s Spatial Data Infrastructure.
• This was an initiative enthusiastically supported by the then Coalition Government, illustrating the strong bipartisan support for the spatial industry. I remember at the time how hard the spatial industry worked to get this agenda up and running.
• The Australian Government launched the Gov 2.0 Taskforce, an initiative to investigate and make recommendations around furthering government collaboration and consultation with citizens, as well as opportunities around opening up government data.

Accessibility of public sector information (PSI) has support at the highest levels of the Australian Government. It has wonderful opportunities for the economy and citizen services with respect to geospatial information but there are equally profound opportunities for transparency and improved accountability in government.

The Australian Special Minister of State has articulated the government’s view that the default position of government ultimately ought to be that all public sector information should be available online unless a case can be made not to release it. We have currently before parliament a Freedom of Information Bill and a Bill for the establishment of an Information Commisioner. These bills begin these reforms and provide the framework for future progress in this crucial area of public policy.

These goals will obviously have a positive impact on geospatial initiatives in the region, and the recommendations from the Gov2.0 taskforce are due out in December. This is a very exciting project and I have been engaged directly in assisting the taskforce through running a Gov 2.0 Public Sphere event to contribute policy ideas.

I also want to mention that I was very pleased to learn that New Zealand has joined the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRC-si). This builds on the strong cross-Tasman relationship that we already have through the Australia New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC), and New Zealand joining the Coperative Research Centre fopr Spatial Information (CRC-si) strenghtens the initiative to create a Australia/New Zealand market place for all spatial data and services. More information on this can be found on page 7 of the August edition of Landmark magazine.

I look forward to learning more about what is happening in New Zealand, and also to do my part in fostering cross-Tasman relations in this space. We have many clever people in both our wonderful countries, and it would be great to collaborate and become a hub of excellence for the region, and the world.

I would like to congratulate all of you here tonight, from both the public and private sectors for the role you play in using spatial data to create the geographic contextualisation and visualisation of data that will help bring the magic and meaning of ICT into the lives of many citizens: perhaps for whom it has been seen as the realm of geeks and techs. For example, maps make data make sense: our visual senses will be stimulated by the inspiring and engaging world of all things digital. The governments that invest early and well in the spatial sector are the governments that will lead in the 21st century.

Good luck in your endeavours.

Thankyou.

Tagged: business, digital economy, gov20, government, ICT, industry, Internet, open government