On Wednesday night last week as part of a gala celebration in Wellington, the State Services Commission picked up an award at the New Zealand Open Source Awards.
While we were finalists in two categories, we ended up watching two other fine projects take to the podium for the laurels in those fields. Congratulations to Radio New Zealand and CityLink for their gongs. Having accepted we were worthy runners-up, it was with some delight that we took to the stage at the end of the night for a special award.
The special award was to acknowledge the work the SSC has done, as Nat Torkington describes it, in levelling the playing field for open source and open data within Government
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Laurence Millar, Government CIO, who accepted the award, emphasized SSC’s focus on open data:
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.
The other special award on the night was won by Matthew Holloway. Matthew has worked with SSC on a couple of projects in the past, including using Plone as the CMS for the e-government site and a little help with his killer Word to HTML converter DocVert. On Wednesday he was singled out for his work with Standards New Zealand on New Zealand’s OOXML submission – the significance of his contribution perhaps best illustrated by some of the peripheral attention that it attracted…
A great many of us here at SSC are honoured to be recognized for the work that we have been doing to advance the use of open source in government. The awards showcase how vibrant open source is in New Zealand and the contribution it is making across the public and private sectors. We would like to congratulate all of the winners, and we look forward to more progress over the coming year.
Read the media release from the Government CIO.
