Matt Cowley Tauranga City Councillor

People are hacking into government information all around the world – it's something I want to encourage.

Not illegal hacking of course, but similar to the secondary school student Mash Up competition last weekend.

They were tasked with designing web-based business ideas to get young people socialising more to cure boredom.

Their solutions pulled together all sorts of information about tourism, transport, sports, shopping and cultural sectors to encourage young people to get out in their community.

I realise the power of open data as I competed in last year's Tauranga Start Up Weekend – a more advanced version of the Mash Up competition.

The government sector is notoriously known for being data-rich but information-poor.

By making councils' raw data publically available we can build intelligence into managing our city.

For instance, Tauranga Safe Cities started to investigate patterns between Police crime data and council's street light and streetscape information.

Our staff are busy running council's day-to-day operations. By making our raw data available for these ‘hack' events, people with fresh perspectives can crunch the numbers to look for patterns in public information. It could help us manage the city better.

It's an incredibly empowering way to engage younger sectors of the community who'd probably scrunch their face if you ask them to write a submission to council's Long Term Plan. It's also a lot cheaper than hiring expert consultants.

A business idea pitched at last year's Start Up weekend was making it cheaper and faster for people to access land and property files from council online.

Councils can only charge cost price for LIMs and PIMs, so I'm all for it if it reduces our costs and speeds up the process!

Government has led the open data initiative by creating www.DigitalNZ.org, which is a portal to access public information across all government agencies and departments.

This is one of many aspects we'll consider as we develop our Digital Strategy to harness the power of information technology.

Feel free to email me your thoughts (matt.cowley@tauranga.govt.nz), call/text me on 027 6989 548, and follow me at www.facebook.com/a.younger.voice.