What is Nathan Torkington talking about?

February 9th, 2010

I'm curious about the New Zealand experience and project referrred to in this week's Economist.

"In one culture clash, Nathan Torkington, an open-source consultant, helped New Zealand’s government assemble sets of data. After a meeting with a minister, he sent a summary of what he learned to members of his mailing list and he was gratefully accosted by subordinates of the minister who said they found out a lot about their boss."

I see nothing on Nathan's blog to identify it. Has it been widely reported in our geek world and I've missed it?

Nathan gets the last words in the article:

"But whatever governments do, the presentation of endless facts can fall flat unless there are independent developers who know what to do with them. As Mr Torkington admits, failing to grasp this point led to disappointing results in New Zealand. In his enthusiasm for technology, he failed to think much about who would use the data he was posting, and why. A wad of facts was dumped in cyberspace, with no instructions or incentives to find good ways of using them. There they sit, unread by any machine. Even the geekiest types can be nonplussed when they are presented with data but no purpose.'

What is this about?

[Wednesday – Thanks John Waugh for the link to Nathan's recent summary]

[Later – and to Bernard Darnton for this reference to a consolidating government website]

Filed under Free Speech

Comments

I'm not in his circles, but these 2 links might shed some more light on what Nat is up to:
NZ Open Govt Online Groups
http://groups.opengovt.org.nz/groups/ninja-talk/messages/topic/6tn6p99mV7UIpgNHV2X18d
"Datahound" article from Idealog
http://idealog.co.nz/magazine/november-december-2009/features/data-hound

Hi, Stephen. I spent over an hour on the phone with the lovely journalist from The Economist, and then found my conversation had been boiled down to those two enigmatic paragraphs 🙂
The first refers to my meeting with Nathan Guy to talk about open data. I had several people tell me, in the following week, that people within the various ministries had been passing around my emailed summary of my meeting. He met me without officials, and apparently everyone was curious to know (a) what happens when officials are out of the room (answer: conversation, duh), and (b) his thoughts and plans for open data.
The second paragraph is a reduction of my "Rethinking Open Data" post. Basically, Open New Zealand built a data catalogue, and that served as a guide for DIA when they built data.govt.nz. Now we have that problem solved, I can see the next problem: connecting with the people who should use that data. It's not that we failed (we've built something that's useful and is necessary for the next steps), just that I was so focused on this first step that I hadn't thought "and then what?". The blog post was aimed at the largely technocrat audience, pointing out that solving the technical problem isn't solving the whole problem. (We technologists need to be reminded of this every day)
I'm very happy with data.govt.nz, it's right up there as a leading example of what governments can and should do. It was part of the Guardian's recent World Government Data project (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world-government-data). It's not the whole of the solution, but (to their credit) nobody in DIA ever said that it would be.
Happy to answer any questions you might have. Once you get me started about freeing up government data, it can be hard to shut me up! 🙂

Nathan gets the last words in the article:
"But whatever governments do, the presentation of endless facts can fall flat unless there are independent developers who know what to do with them. As Mr Torkington admits, failing to grasp this point led to disappointing results in New Zealand. In his enthusiasm for technology, he failed to think much about who would use the data he was posting, and why. A wad of facts was dumped in cyberspace, with no instructions or incentives to find good ways of using them. There they sit, unread by any machine. Even the geekiest types can be nonplussed when they are presented with data but no purpose.'
What is this about?