The open data movement in New Zealand is over ten years old. Over that time, we've seen the passage of world-leading policy and a steady increase in the amount of open data released. But we've also seen the limitations of a movement focused on the release of government data, often at the expense of enabling reuse. As MIT professor Cesar Hidalgo puts it, the open data movement has started with “a throwing-spaghetti-against-the-wall strategy, where opening more data, instead of opening data better, has been the driving force.”
In this talk, I’ll give a brief history of open data, from its birth on servers and zip files, to the first generation of data portal, to its present incarnation with the data service. Giving a ‘warts ‘n’ all’ summary of the state of open data in Australasia and globally, I'll run through some best (and worst) practices, and conclude with some predictions of how the open data movement might evolve in the years ahead.