Open Govt expert to talk at OpenLabourNZ public event

The keynote international speaker at the OpenLabourNZ public event on August 28 has advised US Senators, Congressmen and political leaders on the use of Internet since 1999, including Senate candidate Hillary Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Howard Dean, and Barack Obama (before he became US President).

Andrew Rasiej is a social entrepreneur and Founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and website about the intersection of politics and technology.

He is also the co-Founder of techPresident.com, an award winning blog that covers how the Obama administration is using the web, and how technology is empowering new levels of citizen engagement throughout the United States.

He is also the Senior Technology advisor to the Sunlight Foundation which is pioneering the use of technology to expose corruption in Congress.

Rasiej (who will speak via videolink) will provide the event with a perspective on the new opportunities in the arena of e-government which he calls ‘We-Government’.which is a term he coined that describes how citizens are engaging in new ways with government information, government officials, and each other building new tools and platforms of civic engagement and discourse.

He says this trend is amplified by the fact that government data is starting to be published on the Internet in massive quantities and in formats that allow citizens to work with, display, and organize the information in new ways and merging it with other data they collect themselves from the public realm making it all useful for themselves and their neighbours.

US President Barack Obama’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer Beth Noveck is now unable to be a key note speaker at the OpenLabourNZ public event and iinvited Andrew Rasiej to speak in her place

Registrations opened this week to NZ’s first attempt to develop political policy in an open forum directly involving the community, and using online technology.

The public event on 28 August in Wellington brings together ideas generated over the last four months on how to deliver open and transparent government.

ENDS

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