From:
Julian Carver
Date:
Sep 16 17:30 NZST
Short link
>
> We can fly under the radar at the moment, but as soon as a public
> campaign gets going we're going to lose control of the momentum. We
> don't have full-time PR/lobbyist people - government agencies have lots
> of them. As Andrew points out, let's get something together to discuss
> with agencies and then work to engage with them and get something we can
> all work with.
I'm inclined to agree with Mark on this one.
> Frankly, If I was still a gummint bod, and you sprung
> something like this on me, I'd be writing a Cabinet paper to get the OIA
> changed so that only natural people could make requests, and that might
> have huge downstream and unintended consequences.
>
At the moment the Act states:
Any person, being
-
(a) a New Zealand citizen; or
-
(b) a permanent resident of New Zealand; or
-
(c) a person who is in New Zealand; or
-
(d) a body corporate which is incorporated in New Zealand; or
-
(e) a body corporate which is incorporated outside New Zealand but which
has a place of business in New Zealand,
may request a department or Minister of the Crown or organisation to make
available to him or it any specified official information.
I think it's unlikely it'd get changed to a natural person, but reading the
above probably does mean that for an NZ 'What Do They Know' to work there'd
need to be an incorporated organisation which in effect submitted requests
on behalf of natural persons. Am I reading that correctly?
Also, is there anything in the Act that prevents publication of the
information received in an OIA request? I have a colleague who seemed to
think that was the case.
At the hackfest we set up an online group for the project, so maybe we could
shift the conversations there for those who are interested?
http://groups.open.org.nz/groups/whatddotheyknow
I'll cross post this there to get us started. Nat and others please do come
and join us.
There's also some work that was done on the wiki at:
http://wiki.open.org.nz/What_Do_They_Know_NZ