Since about 2008, Gruden built and maintains eTender and AusTender. I’ve been there since 2012. They have both always had good search and report functions, but neither has had any raw data access until now.
In the last couple of years the NSW Government (and especially Victor Dominello) has made some really clear and helpful decisions about open data. Their open data policy and API standard made it possible for me, as a developer, to design a really good API.
Victor Dominello, the minister for Finance (his last job was Minister for Innovation, and before that Minister for Citizenship and Communities and for Aboriginal Affairs) is very excited about big data, open data, and sharing data throughout government and between government and industry. And he says some fantastic things :
“[The NSW Data Analytics Centre] could have a joint venture in a beautiful blue sky world with a potential unicorn one day” [itnews.com.au march 2017]
“I see any data point as an opportunity,” Dominello said on Monday.”Whatever you can measure, you can capture because none of us know what we could use in that data.”Don’t worry your pretty little heads about what we’re going to use it for, just get it.”The minister touched on the data lake the NSW government is currently building, which he expects will be a data reservoir for not just Finance, but other departments and clusters as well.”Whether it’s petrol prices coming in, or green slip claim forms coming in, whatever it is, it’s all coming into a lake — this beautiful, rich lake — it sounds like I’m building a big wall, but I’m not, I’m building a lake,” the minister said in jest.”It is actually going to be so, so exciting and we’re at the beginning stages of that now. And we are way ahead of every other state and territory in the country — way ahead — and I still think we can go much, much faster.”
[Feb 2017]
Victor talked about launching a “really big program” for open data, working behind the scenes to build “the best, the boldest, and the brassiest that we’ve got in the country because I really believe in the power of open data,” he said. “It will be like the TripAdvisor for open data in NSW.” [http://www.zdnet.com/article/dominello-to-hand-out-agency-innovation-bonus-with-new-finance-responsibilities/]
Next : read about the eTender API we actually built