A New Container

The bodies of law, regulation, and procedure that govern our lives are forms of hyperlinked text, where each part of the system is connected to and dependent on many others. But we have not given this system the most powerful affordances of hyperlinked text, which the internet has spent the past thirty years teaching us to navigate and order and imagine. Instead, we leave it to opaque and lumbering bureaucracies to interpret and steward the frameworks that shape our lives.

Civic reform is most often aimed at the substance of policy, and even when our best minds turn to governance we hear about sweeping changes like electoral finance integrity, shiny new Ministerial portfolios, Government term extension, more Members of Parliament, Official Information Act shake-ups, and other noble topics. Unfortunately, Executive-driven reforms require an exorbitant coincidence of wants, and the changes they imagine may mean almost nothing to most people.

We are planning instead to reshape the substrate of policy, the underlying base on which our laws and regulations are cultivated. This begins not by changing any particular law, but by putting the whole of it into a modern container, where it can be searched and understood and upgraded with minimal friction, and where the case for changing it can be made by anyone.

Aotearoa New Zealand has not lost its capacity to be the place that progressives around the world might seek to emulate; the same national-scale coherence that once made this country a working prototype for pensions and suffrage and centralisation is exactly what makes it conceivable to render an entire legal system as one connected, navigable structure.

There is a version of change that does not wait for government sanction. We prove this in our own lives, switching and shifting the objects and actors of our private spaces in response to innovation, competition, and inspiration. We have so much freedom when it comes to the digital spaces of our private consumption, creative projects, and social connections. But the systems that determine how we live and progress together are medieval, and they are constraints on the progress we need.

We argue that open digital information systems can reinvigorate the operational models of public administration and at the same time move the needle on the strength of our democracy, and that we can begin now.