Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

Almost exactly two years ago Britain's Guardian newspaper ran a thousand word article on a decision by the then New Zealand Government to stop charging the public for statistics.

Yet the decision to have Statistics New Zealand all but abandon the user-pays philosophy and put its data sets up on the web barely caused a ripple in the media here.

The idea that information gathered with public funds should be publicly available was seemingly uncontroversial.

In recent years dozens of publicly funded agencies have embarked on ambitious internet projects that have seen everything from those statistical data sets to old episodes of the TV series Gloss go on-line.

This week on Idea's we take a look at a handful of those publicly funded initiatives and talk to former New Zealand Government Chief Information Officer, Laurence Millar, and Andy Neale of Digital NZ.

Links:

NZ On Screen - www.nzonscreen.com

Te Ara - www.teara.govt.nz

Statistics New Zealand www.stats.govt.nz/default.htm

New Zealand Electronic Text Centre www.nzetc.org

Digital New Zealand Digital New Zealand - www.digitalnz.org

Laurence Millar's blog - globalvillagegovernance.blogspot.com