Kia ora koutou ITP members and supporters and welcome to this weeks digital pānui. I’m really looking forward to the Matihiko awards this evening. It’s gonna be a fantastic celebration of Māori leaders, innovators and change-makers and their contributions to the digital technology ecosystem. Should be heaps of fun. 

One of the best things I did this week was interview Rick Shera. I could listen to Rick for hours on this stuff - it's important and he explains concepts in plain english (something many lawyers avoid). Our Fireside chat was for just 45 minutes and focused on whether New Zealand legislation is up to the job in this changing technology world. Have a listen to Rick’s views on the Privacy Act, where there are legislative gaps, the EU’s AI Act, how New Zealand should be a fast follower and not invent the wheel ourselves and how we are letting the victims of scams down (he’s passionate about this one). I will get him back to talk about Scams very soon. 

Data is the new gold

You will have seen coverage from Phil Pennington recently on the preferred use of multi-national cloud providers by NZ government agencies. 

He took that a step further this week with an interview with Australian cloud provider Canberra Vault Cloud. Headline of this was “New Zealand is in real danger of giving away its capabilities to big foreign firms.” CEO Rupert Taylor-Price goes on to say:

1. "Sovereign capability is very easy to give away - it's a press release, and a ministerial announcement," and
2. "When you look at the economics of this, when you give up your sovereignty of your data, you know, data is the new gold, you're giving up the value of your economy." And
3. "The sad truth is that your local industry rarely has the financial capability to make those big lobbying plays that large multinationals do. And that's not in the interest of the country." And
4. "How many meetings has your prime minister had with the local providers? And how many meetings (has) your prime minister had with the multinationals? That's normally the acid test."

Blogs this week 

Peter’s editorial this week has a cleverly title “Threads of unease” and is all about Threads the new product from Instagram/Meta/Facebook/WhatsApp, where he talks about whether Threads is a beacon of hope and how they have a set of instant followers, unlike some of the other platforms that have tried to compete with Twitter. Peter then reminds us that all of this happened in the week of the earths hottest day since records begin!

Brendon‘s cartoon was also inspired by Threads. 

Earlier in the week, Peter wrote about new life for a radio astronomy station - he explains how our the tiny community of radio astronomers was dealt a major blow last year when cost-cutting at AUT‘s for it’s research operation of the Warkworth satellite station shut down. Well things have changed, and there’s a glimmer of hope this week with an Invercargill based firm SpaceOps expressed interest in taking the astronomy station over. 

Our guest blog is from Ann Toomey McKenna is on the US government buying vast quantities of personal information on the open market, and what this means for privacy and the age of AI. She talks about commercially available information, how it’s better quality, cheaper and less restricted than ever before. She also goes into threats this poses, whether it’s legal And whether our privacy and regulatory frameworks are able to cope with this kind of activity. 

AI wrap - in this edition, copyright case against OpenAI, policy analysts using generative AI to write stuff, Googles new terms and conditions, more on AI and jobs plus a list of articles in brief and new apps on the scene. 

Threads vs Twitter 

Speaking of Threads, there has been plenty of coverage on the latest product, here are a couple of other articles, from NPR and from ABC News. 

Have you used threads yet? I registered which was very easy as an Instagram user. It looks and feels like Instagram with some Twitter similarities. But I can’t see how to find the conversations I am interested in yet. Like Instagram I can search for keywords but so far I can just bring up relevant accounts to follow rather than threads of conversation - but you will likely tell me this is user error. 

Or are you still using Twitter? or moved somewhere else? 

Net safety week coming up 24-30 July 

Something we should all coalesce around as an industry is the amazing mahi of NetSafe, they have become the defacto helpdesk and training provider on all things online-harm, and do am amazing job with limited government funding and support. 

Net safety week is coming up this month with a series of events and the launch of new tools. 

Skills and Salaries

Salaries, in these times of inflation are always a contentious issue and interesting to follow. TradeMe released their new Salary Guide recently. Sadly not much insight for our industry which they call “IT” and they list only two roles/categories - Business and Systems analysts or Programming and development. It would be interesting to understand the size of their sample as Business and Systems analysts salaries have varied wildly according to their graphs in recent years with an overall decline of 3% in salary over time. The graphs are pretty and I imagine over time once they have grown their dataset this could be quite useful. 

To skills. I have mentioned before the wonderful resources the Australian government is developing in the skills space. Here are a couple of examples: 

Skill Finder - Skill Finder gives you access to a range of digital microskills and opportunities for upskilling into sectors and roles for the future. We do have the Digital Boost platform here in Aotearoa NZ, this platform is broader and operates more like a marketplace. 

Career Pathfinder - based on the SFIA framework (yay) this tool helps you navigate roles based on capabilities for our industry. There used to be a nifty spreadsheet you could download also, but they seem to have taken it down. 

Te Reo Māori digital technology terms

Since I am off to the Matihiko awards tonight I thought we might step away from “tech” terms an into celebratory (whakahari) terms instead. 

Ka mau te wehi! = That’s outstanding, well done

Koia kei a koe! = Good on you

Mīharo! = Awesome

Ngā mihi nui ki a koe! = Congratulations

Next Friday will be Matariki so there won’t be a pānui as we will all be remembering, celebrating (whakahari) and looking forward to the future. Have a fabulous long weekend everyone. Mā te wā Vic