As part of improving how we engage with our open data users, we'll be releasing monthly updates highlighting some of the previous month’s work, as well as what we’re up to next.

You can download the update as a .pptx by clicking on the ‘download button’ on this page. You can also read the update as text, below.

We’d love to hear your feedback, thoughts and comments – you can contact us at opendata@data.govt.nz. If you’d like to be added to our updates email list, and / or our user group, please also email us.

Open data at Waka Kotahi – update, April ‘21

INCREASE transparency, REDUCE OIA / data requests, and improve ENGAGEMENT, PROBLEM-SOLVING and INNOVATION

Strategic direction

LIFT open data performance and relevanceFOSTER strong relationshipsIMPROVE decision-makingREDUCE harmENABLE and EMPOWER communities and sectors / industries, allowing FIT-FOR-PURPOSE solutions to challenges at local, regional, national and supranational scales

NZ Government is a signatory to the International Open Data Charter and New Zealand Data and Information Management principles, which follow from the (NZ) Declaration on Open and Transparent Government. Additionally, the Transport Evidence Base Strategy highlights improved access to data – and open data – as a key priority.

What we did (high-level)

Published open data catalogue

Published our first open data catalogue. This will allow users to better understand which open data we currently publish (or don’t), enable them to find existing data, and also request new or updated data.https://opendata-nzta.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/open-data-catalogue

Open data portal content cleanup and style refresh

All the listings in the open data portal have now been rewritten and retagged to improve their findability and their content’s quality. Additionally, we updated the homepage and some other styling to improve accessibility and modernise the look of the platform.https://opendata-nzta.opendata.arcgis.com/

Updated ‘Arataki – impacts of covid-19’ open data and reports

Updated the data, projections, analysis and reports of our commissioned research into potential impacts of COVID-19 on New Zealand’s economy and demographics. We will use them to identify whether there is any required change to its existing assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on the land transport system and the post-COVID opportunities over the next 10 years.https://opendata-nzta.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/arataki-potential-impacts-of-covid-19-data-tables

Gave talk on open data for Public Sector Network event

Gave talk at online event, about “How data openness can drive better outcomes for all”. There will be an upcoming article about this – please contact us if you’d like to see the slides or transcript.https://publicsectornetwork.co/event/virtual-event-big-data-actionable-analytics-nz/

Part of a team-wide award for our recent open data dashboards

Won the “Celebrating Smart Uses of Public Data Award” at the annual Qlik ANZ Digital Transformation Awards, for our recent Qlik-based open data dashboards.https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6795473966346715136/

BAU activities – handling and routing open data-and-related requests

Each month we respond to numerous requests related to current and potential open data. It’s a core part of our work and, from now on, we won’t report against it unless something particularly interesting happens.

This month’s fun fact: 94 entries in open data catalogue

What’s up next (high-level)

First open data webinar, and interactions with user group and update list (user engagement)Updated framework and toolkit, to be published publicly (maturity uplift)Internal open data policy, to be published openly for re-use by other organisations (maturity uplift)Sector-wide open data framework and high-level principles, along with agreed actions (maturity uplift)Panel and talk at upcoming Digital Transformation and Data in Government Summit, covering open data, our work and the third wave of open data (user engagement)Consolidation and improvement of existing open data, as well as work to publish new datasets (BAU)

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash.