Nat Torkington

Judge David Harvey has stepped down from the Kim DotCom case.

Most of us have a case of “you don’t know what you don’t know”: we don’t know the range of what’s possible, so we continue doing things as we’ve seen them done before but with slight improvements.

I’ve been in the position of being a geek talking with teachers for a while, and I’ve found it best to approach the whole area of education with humility.

Every long weekend we hear how many people died, as though it means something, but there’s never any analysis beyond whether it’s more or less than last year’s number.

I’ve been conscientiously using Goodreads to review every book I read.

tl;dr: Charter schools aren’t a panacea, they don’t appear to be compatible with the emphasis on National Standards, and this seems like the top of a slippery slope which will result in us all being as stupid as Americans.

It was my pleasure to address the National and State Librarians of Australasia on the eve of their strategic planning meeting in Auckland at the start of November this year.

Pondering the New Zealand fishing industry, I had an insight today.

There’s a trend now to question the value of a university education.

A busy week but with little progress on MacLean and Higgins.

Our band has two gigs coming up in Auckland and we’d love to see you there!

I love BERG London’s weeknotes and have resolved to follow suit myself.

New Zealand has, for a long time, marketed itself as 100% Pure.

This post is about my 3 March 2011 appearance on Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand.

I resumed my Nine to Noon radio segments on Radio New Zealand.

This post is about my 17 February appearance on Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand.

I was honoured to give a talk of career advice to the 2010 Summer of Tech students.

We’re counting down the days here at the mothership, getting ready for the 5th Kiwi Foo Camp.

Text of notes for a talk given at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the New Zealand Computer Society in Rotorua, 17 September 2010.

Our local newspaper, Mahurangi Matters, had this great piece of short news (sadly not online yet): Local firemen recently responded to a 3.30am call “power causing concern”.

Haegwan is interviewing famous and interesting people to talk about what they do and advice they might have to people wanting to be successful.

Last month I was honoured to join Silverstripe as a director.

You can listen to my Nine to Noon emerging technology slot from 8 April 2010 in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

I talked today about cryptography, China, and Facebook’s billions.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an agreement between countries around IP rights and enforcement.

You can listen to my Nine to Noon emerging technology slot from 18 Feb 2010 in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

I attended a workshop on community management at Webstock, and at the end asked the attendees to write down some words of wisdom for a new community manager, maybe something they wish they’d been told or something they learned at the workshop.

I had a good time a few weeks ago with Russell Brown, Vaughn Davis, and Ms Behaviour talking about social media on the Media 7 show.

I used LGOIMA, the local government equivalent of the Official Information Act, to request details on how much revenue Auckland City council and the Auckland-area collective geospatial body made from geodata sales.

NZICT is an industry lobby group, representing the NZ ICT industry (software, hardware, services, networks, education, and training).

Just a heads-up: over on the O’Reilly Radar blog, I posted about the opportunities for businesses in the future based on Stephen O’Grady’s predictions for 2010.

Citing growth in photo-sharing and social media sites, Telecom have announced they won’t charge for upstream traffic.

If you’re in Wellington on the week of October 19, check out Victoria University’s Open Access events.

I’m meeting the Minister of Internal Affairs for 20m today at 12.30.

Not the solution to the world’s problems, just my agenda this week.

There’s an InternetNZ strategy day for the council.

“You can’t beat Wellington on a good day,” say the Wellingtonians.

(As a new councillor for InternetNZ, I will be pitching into the issues of copyright and censorship.

Tom Steinberg is my pioneer hero of open government.

Clay Shirky, clad in the world’s shiniest shirt, was introduced as “The Oscar Wilde of the Internet” but that was doing him an injustice for Clay is a fantastic combination of thinker and public speaker.

The second Clay, hairier and less well-dressed.

Aneesh Chopra is the US Federal CTO.

I went through two telephones in this Colorado house and neither of them could hold onto the call.

Listen to my 16 July 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show.

Listen to my 2 July 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show.

Glen Barnes and I have softlaunched opengovt.org.nz, an effort to do some MySociety-style projects for New Zealand.

Listen to my 4 June 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show.

Listen to my 18 June 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show.

I’ve grown a row of beetroot and now I’m nervously wondering what the hell one does with a row of beetroot.

I sent this to Minister Worth (in his Internal Affairs role) and Laurence Millar (as Government CIO) today because they both have a desire to see more open government information.