Where we started
Published on January 13, 2025 by Curator
Every day we are all encouraged to work in siloes, separated from each other across organisations, sectors, geography, communities, cultures and disciplines. However, a divided community cannot solve the challenges or act on the opportunities facing us all.
The Digital Aotearoa Collective (DAC for short), a grassroots civil society initiative in New Zealand was first created to unite people who want to help people to take action — dream and build better futures, by building the digital civic-cultural-economic infrastructure that supports them, together.
The initial intention was to bring together a diverse group of experts to solve problems through open collaboration and digital technology, focusing on projects that directly addressed the public service.
We all rely upon and are impacted by the public sector every day. Whether directly, by interacting with the fragmented world of public services or indirectly, through the decisions perpetuated through government funding systems, policies, regulation, legislation, incentives and narratives. Civil society has very little say, low influence and no real participation in the decisions or governance or the systems that enable either, with public engagement having largely become limited to a continuous slew of communications activities (aka. “You’re invited to make a submission”).
The initial intention was to bring together a diverse group of experts to solve problems through open collaboration and digital technology, focusing on projects that directly addressed the public service.
We all rely upon and are impacted by the public sector every day. Whether directly, by interacting with the fragmented world of public services or indirectly, through the decisions perpetuated through government funding systems, policies, regulation, legislation, incentives and narratives. Civil society has very little say, low influence and no real participation in the decisions or governance or the systems that enable either, with public engagement having largely become limited to a continuous slew of communications activities (aka. “You’re invited to make a submission”).
However, the NZ Government has a specific and binding responsibility to shared governance in its constitutional framework (particularly in Te Tiriti) and the 2020 Public Service Act. We, the Digital Aotearoa Collective, believe that shared, participatory governance will be highly beneficial in transforming Aotearoa NZ into a modern, equitable, engaged democracy and civil society that sustains its citizens.
We intentionally stepped outside our professional boxes to combine our skills, hopes, values, and humanity to solve real-world problems. We began with a concept devised by Pia Andrews and Jo Allum comprising three projects.
Optimistic Futures: a project plan for collecting visions of the optimistic futures we want to work towards
Benefitme.nz: an exemplar of what great public services and systems could look like
Regulation-as-code for DApps: digital civic-cultural-economic infrastructure to help democratise the opportunity that comes from living in a digital age
The names for these projects emerged as the team and the work evolved. The original intro pack co-created and shared to unite the group and launch the collective can be found here.
Optimistic Futures: a project plan for collecting visions of the optimistic futures we want to work towards
Benefitme.nz: an exemplar of what great public services and systems could look like
Regulation-as-code for DApps: digital civic-cultural-economic infrastructure to help democratise the opportunity that comes from living in a digital age
The names for these projects emerged as the team and the work evolved. The original intro pack co-created and shared to unite the group and launch the collective can be found here.