Youth voices on the future
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The TECH Execs
The TECH Execs are a group of students who form a panel and reference group for the Wellington City Council, providing input and stimulation to the Council's strategic development. They were asked what they wished the future of e-government would be like. Three of the TECH Execs – Matt Dodd, Josie Fenwicke, and David Tredger – offer their views on sustainability, broadband, and copyright.
Youth voices on the future
Matt Dodd
E-government today seems to be in fairly good state. Although I have no experience comparing our systems to those overseas, I feel a solid effort has been made to make some government resources available online. Things like being able to arrange and pay for Land Transport appointments online and check the companies register, file returns, and the like are incredibly useful for me – more so I imagine for people in the country where it's harder to get to government agencies. However despite great efforts made by the civil service to provide access for New Zealanders to government through electronic means, I believe the government needs to go one step further and consider providing legal and regulatory structure in the electronic world as much as it does in the 'real world'.
There are over 1.4 million internet connections in New Zealand which are estimated to be regularly used by 75% of the population. This raises serious questions of the role of government. If the government both accepts and encourages the use of e-government and the technologies required to access it, are they going to extend their responsibility over their citizens when using these technologies – at least as far as is possible within the limits of sovereignty? This raises another question: will the government defend our 'electronic sovereignty' and independence? Why is it that the two big Telcos (Telecom and TelstraClear) are allowed to refuse to 'peer' with local small ISPs and content providers, forcing data that could be kept within the country and travel perhaps a few hundred metres to be sent all the way to Australia or the United States and back? This is not to mention 'net neutrality' and the concept that government should legislate to ensure corporations don’t discriminate against competitors' content by making it slower or more difficult to access than their own. We should be concerned that such a vital part of our communications system has the potential for such abuse and disruption, given that we allow it to be mostly removed from local supervision. And although we have the Centre for Critical Infrastructure Protection, can the government guarantee that New Zealand would be prepared for a sustained 'cyber-siege' upon the government computer networks that we rely on in the event of an incident that occurred recently between Estonia and suspected Russian hackers?
The other key area in which government needs to adapt and reconsider is the law. From what I can observe, most e-government is currently the result of digitising an existing paper/agency-bound service. Why not go beyond providing a subsidiary of an existing service and look at what ways the government should cater primarily for the online community? For example, we need to adapt copyright to account for its significance in cyberspace. Until recently, owning an iPod was effectively illegal for the purpose for which it was designed – playing music – since there were almost no legal ways to put commercial music onto it. You can't move the contents of a CD you own onto your iPod to listen to without being a criminal, yet I would estimate that 75% of my schoolmates do so on a regular basis simply because the law has not caught up with technology. If the will of the people is that format-shifting remain illegal, then so be it, but the law risks becoming an ass in the eyes of the younger generation who simply see it as outmoded. And if one was challenged on such an issue and taken to court, yet another area of the outdated law would be exhibited in that electronic documents carry less legal weight in court than paper documents.
With this in mind, I wish that government will ensure that not only the state services, but legislation itself does not fall behind technological change.
Josie Fenwicke
I wish… That the government became more involved in solving the looming inevitability of Global Warming. They cannot stop this from occurring but they can help prevent it for generations to come. To do this by 2020 the government should try to prevent MPs from travelling by air to go to parliament every week. With technology as it stands at the moment, they should be able to use teleconferencing to undergo parliament. This would also deter people from travelling by air around the country for small meetings or conferences. Although these tend to be attractive for private businesses and organisations around New Zealand, if the government showed that they disapproved of air travel for business reasons would sufficiently decrease the number of flights around the country. This would also be a deterrent for international travel for conferences and meetings that are now possible over the internet via teleconferencing. The experience is almost the same and the amount of CO2 being produced is sufficiently less to that of the previous amount. The government could also encourage the use of email and teleconferencing around the country and between cities instead of transporting oneself to the place of the meeting.
David Tredger
I wish… the Internet would run at full speed everywhere, upload and downloading in the blink of an eye, and with no cap…!
New Zealand is very far behind in the Broadband world. In the US a 16mbps connection would be seen as average or even slow, a 10mbps connection seen as unfair, where as in New Zealand these speeds would be seen as a good connection, it just shows how far we are behind and how much there is to improve on. Schools, Businesses and also home users, whether it be researching for a school assignment, buying goods online, downloading the latest updates or checking your emails, everyone would benefit from a faster, larger connection. In the future when this does become a reality and people's lives are centered solely around computers/technology/the internet, do we want to be held back because we didn't take the necessary action in the past. Consequently resulting in the rest of the world being years ahead of us in the technological world?
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