Talofa lava, hello ITP members and supporters, it’s Samoan language week, here is a link to some greetings and other phrases we can all use like, Manuia le also, which means have a good day.

The last few weeks my pānui has felt dominated by AI, in my defence 80-90% of the digital technology news, and an increasing percentage of mainstream news these days is on how emerging AI technology is shaping up. So I took the rash decision last night to start a weekly AI wrap rangitaki (blog) instead - shuffling all of those AI news items that caught my eye this week off into one blog for you to digest, hopefully means there will be more space to share other great things here!

Lost amongst the AI news this week has been the release of the long, long awaited Content Regulatory Review consultation on Safer Online Services and Media Platforms. At a high level the proposal is:

• Parliament will set New Zealand’s expectations for the safety-based outcomes platforms must achieve.
• Codes of practice will set out more detailed minimum expectations for harm minimisation, user protection and transparency across services.
• An independent regulator would be responsible for approving the codes and making sure platforms comply with those codes, as well as funding and finding opportunities for education

Read this great (and amusing) wrap of why this is so important here on the Spinoff then head over to the DIA’s website for the discussion document, factsheet and submission form.
Upshot from me, this is long overdue, if these reforms mean online content rules reflect those of traditional media then that’s a great step forward. I expect our friends at InternetNZ will come out with industry insights on this but also hope to have some good discussions with ITP members in coming weeks as well.

Something else we all need to pay attention to is Australia’s digital technology sector job growth aspirations. With an 8% growth in their workforce last year and a government target of 1.2M digital tech workers by 2030 I expect we are going to see more aggressive targeting of our workforce than we have currently. Our government has a target to diversify our workforce which is simply awesome, but they are silent on targets around sector or workforce growth. I could not find any NZ by sector growth info on Stat’s website when searching to compare - where do I find this insight?

How do we feel?????

Last year many of you responded to a series of surveys we ran asking how you felt about a raft of things - working from home or the office, stress levels, the education system, your current job etc. Well we’re back this year asking you to compare how you feel today. Even if you didn’t compete this survey last year it would be great to get your insight. 
We will leave this open until the end of June 2023 and then publish a report with the analysis of how we feel now compared with last year. I hope you have a spare 5 mins max to do this for all of us. 

How do we feel 2023 survey.

Blogs this week 

Peter’s post on digital twins earlier in the week inspired this weeks Cartoon from Brendan. It’s great to see there is activity emerging in this space and the announcement of a digital twins partnership group. 

Peter’s editorial this week is on Research and Development investment in Aotearoa NZ - the tide is slowly turning. It seems we have improved if the RDTI (research and development tax incentive) scheme figures are anything to go by, but we are still a long way behind other nations who are seriously investing in R&D - nationally we spend 1.4% on R&D vs the likes of Isreal and South Korea at 5% for instance. Personally I was one of the industry advocates who fought for the RDTI scope to be broadened so digital technology investment would qualify, it’s still not quite there but great to see some uptake from our sector. 

Earlier in the week Peter also wrote a great article on how algorithms are helping cure diseases and the recent breakthrough on foot and mouth disease. 

As I mentioned above my AI wrap up for the week can be found here. 

Other news

I stumbled across this article on South Auckland students who are fundraising so they can attend a bootcamp with NASA - Ōtara to NASA - what a cool STEM initiative and opportunity. I went to the givealittle and found you need to donate to a specific student so will reach out and find out whether it’s possible to donate more generally and let you know next week.

There was an interesting series of articles earlier this week on cyber vulnerabilities of schools. Don’t get me wrong it is great this really important topic got some attention, but it came across a bit like a consulting firm looking for a customer (to me). Hat off to the Ministry (and Stuart) for fronting up and responding to just how complex the challenge of protecting schools is when students and teachers can bring their own devices and use school email addresses for accessing any services they wish.

Speaking of government and supply community tensions, also in the media this week Spark offered to refactor their contract with government for the rollout of 5G to divert focus into developing network resilience post the many recent weather related devastating events. On this occasion it seems the government weren’t keen to change the contract as it’s linked with deliverables for other telco’s - Spark recommends our government look to what the Australian government are doing.

Events 

The next Wellington DevOps meetup group event will feature a talk from ITIL guru Mark Smalley 
Mark was the Lead Editor of ITIL 4 High Velocity IT. Also known as The IT Paradigmologist, he thinks, writes and speaks extensively about IT 'paradigms' – in other words our changing perspectives on IT. He is a Global Ambassador at the DevOps Agile Skills Association (DASA) and has contributed to loads of bodies of knowledge. 
It’s quite a coup getting Mark to speak, even virtually like this, it’s on June 14th at 4pm, open to anyone and you can register here.

Our next two Fireside Chats will be held late June / early July. We have made these open to anyone to attend live (not just ITP members).

• On June 28th I will be discussing career development and growth with the ITP President and Deputy - Ants and Jamie respectively - who are both experienced managers, mentors and have great insight into career development, goal setting and pivoting in your career.
• Then on July 5th Rick Shera and I will sit down and discuss the question - Is our legislation up to the job? Rick did his masters in internet and copyright law and practices in all things information technology law wise, IP, copyright, cyber security, privacy - you name it. This will be a fun, robust and challenging discussion I promise. 

ITP member only events coming up

• Tech chat Tuesday is next week and we will be discussing whether we (ITP) should develop an AI Code of Ethics? and what that might include
• Ōtepoti Dunedin have a curry night next week on Tuesday also

Te Reo Māori digital technology terms

• taputapu is device or hardware
• tāura is input 
• tāputa is output
• patuiro is debugging

This week I sourced words from the Core Education glossary resource, these have been updated on the list in this rangitaki (blog).

Finally, I hope you are all excited about the long weekend ahead and get some time to relax and enjoy the company of friends and whānau. Tōfā soifua, goodbye. Vic