2028 | Integrated Policy Mapping

It takes specialised legal training and subject-specific experience to turn an idea into a workable object of reform. This is the hurdle that even political leaders must clear. Ministers, Members of Parliament, and other civic leaders do not always know precisely which levers to pull to change their particular status quo. For an ordinary citizen, meaningful change can seem opaque and unattainable — we grow cynical that the law could make things better, or we lack the civic grounding to imagine that change is even possible.

Our first major tool aims to change this by transforming how people encounter the legal architecture of New Zealand: from a static, opaque archive into a dynamic, explorable, and intelligible system that connects lived realities to the legislation, regulation, and operational procedure beneath them.

We will treat the body of law, regulation, and procedure as an evolving and interconnected codebase, a programmable representation parsed into a machine-interpretable form with real dependency graphs, versioning, and semantic structure. Proprietary platforms built by the likes of LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters prove this method for professional uses; our task is to build the capability as public civic infrastructure.

Aotearoa New Zealand was a temporary global pioneer in the idea of Rules-as-Code for a few years between 2018 and 2022. The Better Rules programme, the Service Innovation Lab, OpenFisca-Aotearoa and Rāpu Ture were good ideas that began inside the government, thinned out, and effectively died in the hands of volunteers. Our projects must be structured to withstand collapse with a bespoke entity, lean governance, arm's length funding, and a fundamental willingness to pass stewardship to the right long-term holder once its users determine where it belongs.

We acknowledge that open licensing has a specific history as an extraction vector: permissive licences let anyone take and reuse material under terms the original community might have refused, which is precisely why Te Hiku Media built the Kaitiakitanga Licence to retain guardianship rather than surrender it. For Crown-authored statute, wide openness is plainly good. For material of significance to Māori, openness must be differentiated and in places deliberately closed.

Black-letter statute cannot by itself do justice to Māori. Much of the relevant richness lives in Waitangi Tribunal determinations and a wider body of cultural precedent, and it raises questions of data sovereignty and authority that this architecture must not presume to resolve. Iwi, hapū, marae, urban Māori authorities, the Data Iwi Leaders Group and pan-tribal bodies hold different authority over different things. Identifying who holds mandate over which layer is itself the first substantive requirement of co-design.

This tool will exist to arm the person making the judgement, not to replace them. Its promise is to serve as a civic infrastructure platform for public engagement with law, a reform accelerator that surfaces contradictions, dependencies, and outdated structure, and an educational and research tool with real potential for institutional partnership.