Over the course of 2023 we are exploring and gathering over 100 futurescapes. Contributions will be curated from diverse community perspectives across Aotearoa, New Zealand.
They will be shared openly as a resource to better understand the opportunities and challenges of a pivot toward digital delivery of Aotearoa's systems of civic and cultural governance to ensure a thriving environment, society and economy.
While digitising the delivery of services currently provided by the public sector can streamline many things for many people, it can also exacerbate cultural, generational, economic and digital divides. It is our hope that through exploring possible futures we can understand both the challenges and opportunities present immediately and deep into the future.
Imagine what might be possible if Aotearoa were to have a vibrant, user-focused and trustworthy digital infrastructure for governance, appropriately and effectively developed and maintained by citizens.
An infrastructure to which citizens are happy to contribute and understand how they benefit from their investment of data, information, knowledge and expertise to create services that enrich the lives of all our people. Then, for a moment, imagine things "going to custard", the proverbial pendulum swinging the other way, what are the ways in which a government could demand and capture citizen data and use it for nefarious purposes and make life in Aotearoa unbearable for all or some. Our optimistic and pessimistic futures workshops aim to create space for these conversations and to draw diverse perspectives out of all kinds of people who live, work and contribute in New Zealand. Participating in this initiative, as a supporting organisation, as a participant, or as a facilitator are all incredibly valuable ways for us to co-create the future for digital Aotearoa we want to see.
We will work through 2023 to facilitate workshops (online and in-person as possible) which gather and collect unique perspectives on what the hopes, dreams and fears are about a more connected digital government of the future. What opportunities can we collectively head toward, what sand-pits and dangers can we avoid. We hope that through this exercise we can invite us all to co-create the future, balanced betwen brave optimisim and cautious pessimim, in hopes that in-between these extremes we can map the future we want to head towards together.
Workshops will strive to develop ways that we can capture contributions from community members. Through participant's written, spoken, transcribed and multimedia contributions, we'll catalog and organise these futures into a resource that can become a reference data set for alignment of the digital society and government of Aotearoa we'd like to see. This can act as inspiration, an inventory of possibilities and a reference for our work and its possible impacts.
Select futures will become the anchor for a multimedia VR experience to be delivered at the end of 2023. This Virtual Reality future will allow anyone to have an opportunity to wear VR goggles and "walk into" a future we've co-created together.
Our primary mechanism for funding these workshops is to partner with organizations that can benefit from this library of possible and avoidable futures. If your organization is thinking about how it undergoes a digital transformation, or how the pivot to digital will work in 15, 30, 50 years, we want your involvement and participation.
- This work is part of a larger work program "Digital Aotearoa Collective" considering the people, tools and systems which will enable a productive digital future for the public service in New Zealand. Through this work we hope to demonstrate a public commons for legislation represented as code using high-value use-case and a Service Aotearoa demonstrator which demonstrates what's possible when service offerings of government are shared and delivered with low friction in digital ways.*