I don't think the idea of a cultural portal is a bad one, but I have never felt NZLive was a good realization of this idea. However I remain unconvinced with the arguments about wasting taxpayers money because the vast majority of 'waste' goes directly into Wellington's local economy anyway (it's easy to understand why others feel differently), but I do agree in the case that the money has clearly been squandered. I'm not sure how clear it is in this case, the only empirical evidence seems to be the graph of traffic stats.
What nobody has raised is that this outcome is might be due in no small part to the private sector contractors who made the site lacking the complete vision (or perhaps the $$ they were demanding) to produce something that lived up to the concept and promise of a cultural portal, and instead has become a basic events guide site. Most of the issues being expressed about what NZLive should or should not be doing are not just a case of government management (mismanagement if you insist), but are emergent from the relationship between the government and private sector. To a large extent, government departments rely on the good judgment of their business and design partners to guide them. When agencies enter into these relationships, there is not necessarily a clear pathway from the high level rhetoric of ministers, to the actual administration of funding and management of projects. That's just a simple fact of any hierarchical organization. A lot of people arguing about this kind of spending don't realize how much of our educational and cultural fabric is derived from this funding, and how impoverished we would be without the various things that are being funded. Spending money is not synonymous with wastage, each case has to be assessed in context. I would be hesitant to publicly lambast government and MCH, without first knowing the details of these relationships and the lines of responsibility. Promoting arts and culture is a part of MCH's mandate, and whether or not NZLive achieves this, it is designed to achieve this, which is enough to justify its existence from a funding perspective. Looking at the documents it's clear that this project was initiated long before EventFinder launched, so at the point of its initiation, there would have been no such service. The problem I have trying to process some of the arguments here, is that apart from the graph of traffic, I don't see what the evidence is that the website has failed to meet its objectives. Overpriced, yes. Failure, unclear. For what it's worth, I would rather see the NZLive money spent on arts funding directly. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
