Speech from NetHui on Open Government and Government 2.0

NetHui was an annual gathering convened by InternetNZ — New Zealand's domain-name and internet-governance non-profit — that ran first in mid-2011 in Auckland and became the country's principal cross-sector internet-policy convening for the rest of the decade. The first edition drew several hundred attendees from the New Zealand civic-tech, telecom, government, academic, and rights-organisation communities, including Department of Internal Affairs staff, Statistics NZ, the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, and a substantial Māori-data-sovereignty contingent.

The Government 2.0 framing in 2011 New Zealand had a distinctive shape compared to the U.S. or UK conversations. The 2010-launched Wellington data.govt.nz portal, the State Services Commission's Better Public Services targets focused on digital-service uptake, and the 2010 New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing Framework (NZGOAL) — recommending Creative Commons licensing for all government-published works — gave the local conversation a more explicit licensing-and-data-rights spine than was typical elsewhere.

NetHui ran annually through the late 2010s and the first-edition speeches and panels remain a useful reference for the New Zealand civic-tech intellectual lineage. The post-NetHui period in New Zealand has produced some of the more analytically careful work on indigenous-data sovereignty (the Te Mana Raraunga Māori Data Sovereignty Network) and on the limits of the standard open-data framework as applied to indigenous-knowledge contexts.