Opening Government data for the public is not easy

Nat Torkington is very keen on openness for Government data, and has been involved in at least 2 such projects. He admits he made mistakes, such as not initially looking to determine who the users actually were, and then finding that there were several dissimilar groups who had had conflicting requirements. Here he shares some of what he learnt to help others not to repeat the same mistakes.

The open data projects he worked on:

Open New Zealand
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Welcome to open.org.nz. We develop and host projects around transparency, participatory democracy, and generally making central and local government useful to citizens and businesses.
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Government datasets online
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Official Statistics are produced by government departments to provide information for government and government departments, local government, businesses and the general public.
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The film Avatar was created with Linux

Most computer graphics you see in modern films is either done with Linux or on a Mac. However, from what I can gather, Linux boxen are used for the majority of computer graphics in films, in fact I don't know of any that used the Apple Mac (if anyone knows of any film with extensive computer graphics that is not produced with Linux, please let me know!).

Note that 'boxen' is Geek talk for two or more computers, derived from the slang term 'Vaxen' for a group of computers running the VAX operating system. The VAX O/S is no longer used to the best of my knowledge.

In fact the Linux render farms (the boxen that create the computer graphics) used at WETA Digital are in the list of the top 500 super computers of the world. Needless to say that over 90% of the top 500 super computers use Linux, and most of the rest use a variety of Unix.


For some reason, successes due to Linux, tend to have the Linux part omitted from articles in the media:
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A review of the company that made the Linux computer graphics happen, known as WETA Digital (Wellington, New Zealand, a Peter Jackson spin off company), is notoriously absent from the articles.
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