Open Government
-
"Acts of Words", by David Friggens
Most New Zealanders are like me, I'm guessing, and have never seriously considered specifically the large body of laws that govern us. After all, what could be more boring that a huge corpus of dry text? "Acts of Words" is a site for exploring legislation, specifically NZ Acts of Parliament. You can search, sort and filter the list to find different Acts, and find out information about the words they contain - how many there are, how "readable" the document is, and what the common words and phrases are. Through word clouds and some minor statistics to just exploring the list of names and stumbling across surprises, the site gives a better appreciation of the laws of our land and opens some questions that hopefully interest people into exploring more.
-
"BarTender's Cell Site Info.", by Peter Lambrechtsen
I built a KML Tables and now moved to Fusion Tables representation of all the Mobile Phone Cell Sites as per what's in the Radio Spectrum Management MED Site. I posted the most recent version here : http://www.geekzone.co.nz/BarTender/7783 and my older post is here: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/BarTender/7403
Selected judges' comments
"It's potentially genuinely useful: we all know what it is like to be out of signal range, and not know which way to go to get back on the grid. If you had already opened this map on your phone or laptop before you lost connectivity, it would help you steer yourself back onto the network.
-
"Definer", by Mohammad Abdullatif
Definer won the Open Government category sponsored by Parliamentary Counsel Office
Definer is a dictionary of all terms defined in the New Zealand Acts of Parliament. Definer provides three services on top of the dictionary. The law in New Zealand impacts our life deeply. We interact with it and discuss it regularly, yet there is no dictionary available online which lists the meanings of the terms defined in the law. If I am arguing with a friend over the legal meaning of a term, it is hard to come to an agreement or find an answer quickly. That is where Definer comes in! Definer is a dictionary of all terms defined in the New Zealand Acts available online on the NZ Legislation website. Definer provides three services: 1. Term Index: All terms defined in the Acts are presented using an alphabetical index. The terms have been extracted from the Acts and only their definitions are shown. 2. Smart Search: Some terms are defined across multiple Acts and therefore have multiple definitions. Definer allows searching through the terms and presents all definitions of the term along with the act name, part and section in which the term was defined to show the context of the definition. 3. Cloud Timeline The timeline presents a tag cloud of the most frequent terms in their Acts by decade starting from the year 1900. This is to show the different themes present in the law across the different decades. Each tag in the cloud represents a term and can be clicked on to view its definition(s). Benefits of Definer: - Allows finding legal meanings of terms quickly across all Acts with an easy to use interface that shows only the definition of a term and not the whole section where the term is defined - Provides an alphabetical index of all terms defined in the Acts of Parliament that are available online - Shows the different themes present in the law per decade since 1900 - Available publicly and is free of charge I hope students, journalists, lawyers and everyone else finds it useful! -
"Lawhub: New Zealand Legislation Visualised", by Rowan Crawford
Lawhub is git -- a version control system -- for legislation. It parses the xml documents of legislation provided at http://legislation.govt.nz/subscribe and examines them for differences between the versions. It's cool because it lets you get at the meat of what's changed between the iterations of law. You can search for particular words within the term of a government. Words which are popular within a term are extracted and ranked; the acts which have had the largest weight of text are displayed. It also tries -- emphasis on the "tries" -- to match a Te Ara article with the term of the government being examined. In conclusion, lawhub lets you see how a government has spent its time. And that's awesome!
Selected judges' comments
LawHub shows you what was important to each government, and how that has changed over time. Judges see potential for this entry and Search and Visualise and would like to see these two excellent projects work together.
-
"Mister EFU", by Keith Ng
How has the government's fiscal projections changed? And why? The purpose of this visualisation is to tell us what our fiscal future looks like and how it changed with each Budget update. Why is it that Budget 2007 thought we would have a $5b surplus last year, but by Budget 2009 this was revised down to a $9b deficit, and it actually turned out to be an almost $17b deficit? Some of the reasons - tax cuts - are easy to show, but they are just one of many changes. The bottom half of the visualisation allows users to dig in to the details of the projections. The purpose of the top half is to provide a tangible representation of time, since we have projections which were created at different times ("Budget 2007", "Budget 2008"..) and each projection is an estimate of many points in time. This was, perhaps, a ludicrous amount of complexity for Mix and Mash. It takes the Fiscal Strategy Model that were produced for the past five Budgets (in the Economic and Fiscal Updates, or EFU) and breaksdown and compares them. The model was not designed for longitudinal comparison, so some serious data cleaning was required to make them comparable to each other. Ultimately, this is probably not very digestible for a general audience. However, it is by far and away the most digestible representation of fiscal projections we have.
Selected judges' comments
"Nice presentation, took a complex area and simplified it, good analytical tools"
-
"NZ Wireless Map", by Mark Hansen
I've never seen anything like this before. It takes open government data (from the Radio Spectrum Management office) and presents it in an accessible and easy-to-browse way. It shows you where radio connections are, making the invisible visible, and it provides insight into how the government is licensing radio spectrum.
-
"Search and Visualize Key Topics in the New Zealand Legislation (http://www.nzlawsearch.com/)", by Nathan Holmberg, Alyona Medelyan
The main data set used for this Mashup consists over 2,700 Acts available via the NZ Legislation http://www.legislation.govt.nz/. Unlike many other data sets, legislation documents are primarily chunks of text, i.e. unstructured data that is difficult to visualize. Common visualizations of such data are stream graphs or tag clouds, which require automated tag assignment. The caveats here are inaccuracy (e.g. splitting text into words should avoid tags like “zealand”) and inconsistency (“immigrant” and “immigration” should appear as one tag). We solved these issues using the linguistic API by a NZ company Pingar (the company Alyona works for). It is available free for research purposes and prototype systems. To achieve consistency we used the UK Public Sector Vocabulary IPSV, which we have manually converted into a NZ version (NZPSV). Metadata assignment with NZPSV is now available via Pingar’s Taxonomy Matching service to everybody (http://www.pingar.com/DevelopersEE.aspx). Each NZ Act and corresponding auto-detected topics were indexed using the open-source search engine Solr, which allows searching inside this data and refining of results by facets. Is it an improvement to the original search on Legislation.govt.nz (the preview)? We think so. Instead of a plain list of matching titles, our Mashup allows users to navigate the NZ Law with as much fun as they experience refining search results on sites like Trademe. The application is thought through, but do expect qualitative improvements after October 3rd: A great chunk of the competition time we spent in the desert of Nevada on holidays… We are also waiting for the final release of legislation.govt.nz to ensure that we can link documents to the correct location on their original site. We believe that our MashUp is useful for research purposes as it allows one to retrospectively understand how the NZ legislation has been crafted, what topics were trending in particular decades and which areas have received most attention. It is also educational for adults as well as for kids. Multiple colourful visualizations catch people’s attention and encourage learning more about the NZ law.
Selected judges' comments
"Judges liked that it was possible to see, at a glance, the changing importance over time of a given topic. The synonym-rich search makes the arcane language of law more accessible to the general public. Judges see potential for this entry and Lawhub and would like to see these two excellent projects work together."
-
"Twenty Years of NZ On Air Music Funding: 1991-2011", by Matt Scheurich
This data mashup displays NZ on Air funding data for musical projects. It shows a timeline of funded projects, along with project and funding totals for each year, artist and management/production company. It provides a basic top-down look at how NZ musicians and affiliated companies are being funded through the ages and what for.
Selected judges' comments
"Nice presentation, easy to use, easy to compare funding allocations"
-
"WhatDoTheyWant", by Jonathan Hunt
WhatDoTheyWant (WDTW) tracks website policies of NZ government agencies. It can show the differences between versions of a policy, and allow comments and feedback on a policy. WhatDoTheyWant aims to: - Provide a public forum for interpretation and discussion regarding Government website terms of use, particularly with respect to copyright - Reduce ad-hoc licensing in favour of consistent licensing per NZGOAL, in part by measuring progression towards common license terms (particularly CC) - Encourage adoption of Creative Commons licenses per NZGOAL, in part by measuring progression towards machine-readable license metadata - Expose to scrutiny particularly unhelpful, onerous or hostile terms of use - Assist with raising awareness of copyright, privacy and the nuances of policy documents WhatDoTheyWant is inspired by TOSBack, from the EFF (see http://www.tosback.org/). TOSBack tracks policies of major web brands such as Amazon, Apple and Facebook. WhatDoTheyWant expands on TOSBack by adding tags, comments, additional feeds. Numerous additional features can be added if time allows.
Selected judges' comments
"I like the fact that it is cheeky, original, and a good reminder that some of the things that people will do with open data are a) not going to make the government happy b) are worth doing anyway. It got marked down a touch, however, because there isn't much data on the site to show that the implementation definitely works, though."
