Announcing Mix and Mash: The Great NZ Remix and Mashup Competition

Hiya,

Announced this morning is a New Zealand competition to get people using
NZ digital content and data. The competition will go live in November so
this is really just a heads up:

www.mixandmash.org.nz

Open New Zealand, together with some other orgs are getting in behind
this, and a big thanks to Glen and Nat for their support. They are both
in the air travelling at the moment, but they have noted the appeal of
the mashup side is in its call to action. We'll be working hard to make
sure this comes off.

In anycase, below is a little more info that you won't find on the
general announcement page. More soon.

Cheers,
Andy

On behalf of the Mix and Mash crew

*******

The competition is being run to assist New Zealand organisations to
release their content and data for reuse, and to encourage the creation
of new tools, services and experiences using this material – from iPhone
apps to digital stories to things the organisers haven’t even thought of
yet.

Mix and Mash aims to:

-broaden New Zealand support for open and reusable digital content and
data
-encourage and reward development that uses New Zealand digital content
and data
-strengthen relationships between digital content and data producers and
the developer and creative communities.

Competition details, including categories and prizes, will be announced
at a special event in early November, and the competition will run for
approximately 3 weeks. Entries will be showcased online after the
competition closes.

Mix and Mash is being run together with DigitalNZ, Webstock, NZ On
Screen, Creative Commons New Zealand, Open New Zealand, data.govt.nz,
and the National Library of New Zealand. If you have content or data
you’d like to open up for the competition, or ideas on how you could
get involved with this effort, we’d love to hear from you:
<email obscured>

To sign up for competition updates, go to www.mixandmash.org.nz

>
> Both Nat and I have been traveling for the last few days but we are both
> really looking forward to this competition. We are really looking forward to
> some of the new datasets that will be open and can't wait to see what people
> will do with them.
>

I'm very excited about this. During the #nzdata workshops there were several
suggestions about doing some kind of hackfest/competition. Mike Brown from
Webstock came to the second workshop and talked about the idea, and there
was significant enthusiasm for it from the govt folks there.

It's awesome to see it having come together as an event involving both govt
agencies/services (Natlib, DigitalNZ, data.govt.nz, NZ On Screen) and NGOs
(Webstock, open.org.nz, Creative Freedom Foundation, Creative Commons). To
me the open data 'movement' has a lot to do with building bridges across the
boundaries between govt, NGOs and citizens. This will be a big opportunity
to advance this and show people what's possible when we work together across
those boundaries.

The competitions they've had like this in Australia seem to have been very
successful, both in terms of raising profile, and enabling really useful
things to be built. See:

   - http://mashupaustralia.org/winners/
   - http://www.premier.vic.gov.au/app-my-state/the-winners.html
   - http://www.information.nsw.gov.au/apps4nsw

On Thursday at the 3rd #nzdata workshop we'll work towards getting some more
govt datasets opened that might be useful for the competition. If you have
any further suggestions for datasets you'd like to be opened (especially if
it's for something you'd like to build for the competition), please suggest
them here, or tweet about them using the #nzdata tag.

Julian