SSC wins open source award

The State Services Commission has won a special award at the New Zealand Open Source Awards in Wellington last week.

Laurence Millar, Government CIO says the SSC won an award for overall leadership in the promotion of open source in government in New Zealand.

This award recognises the work SSC is doing to transform the way New Zealanders can access government information.

In fact while it’s great to receive this open source award. In government we are looking wider than making software freely available. In government we’re not just striving for open source we are really working on open data.

By that I mean we are committed to making public information accessible to everyone.

Information should be available in the way you want it, when you want it. It means that while respecting the individual’s privacy, government held information should be available for use and reuse by the community.

That’s a challenge in itself but government is in the information business – a business that is changing dramatically. Our task is taking a bureaucracy that was built for the industrial age and transforming it to meet the needs of the information age.

Two great examples of SSC’s open source work were finalists in the awards and received runners-up awards.

The newzealand.govt.nz Lightweight Content Management System was a finalist in the Open Source Use in Government category. And the National Broadband Map was a finalist in the Open Source Use for Infrastructure category.

The National Broadband Map is a living example of open source and open data at work. It charts New Zealand's Broadband landscape and provides information and tools to help demand aggregation and infrastructure planning. It uses open source software and provides information which can be reused in a number of ways.