Why collect digitisation ideas?

The Make it Digital Voting tool is a way for people to communicate their need for NZ digital content. There are a couple of things we are hoping to achieve:

• Give a voice to people who need digital content, and a gentle flag to content providers that there is a need
• Enable a conversation about why particular content is needed
• Encourage organisations who are undertaking digitisation work, or who are funding it, to use this information as part of their decision making process
• Identify trends that can help inform new strategies for ramping up digitisation in NZ
• Crowdsourcing these ideas in a single space allows for the unexpected to happen. Will a collective voice emerge? Will demand be fragmented or clustered in some way? Will new business models emerge for serving this demand, or does nobody care? What new tools and approaches could build on this work?

Votes are a useful indicator of interest, but if we're completely honest we think it's the comments and conversations that are really valuable in demonstrating need.

New Zealand is a small nation, and we need to be creative about how to encourage digitisation and the creation of new digital content. Having a good understanding of what people actually want and why is a good start.

How can my organisation use this feature?

If your organisation has plans to digitise content, you can get feedback on your proposals by posting your digitisation plans. A suggested approach is:

1. Create a new user account with the name of your organisation in the username e.g. TimbuktuMuseum
2. For every digitisation option you are considering, post a new idea for people to comment on
3. Start a local campaign to encourage your customers to look at your ideas and share their opinions. You might like to encourage them to post their own ideas as well
4. On each idea page you'll be able to click on your name (e.g. TimbuktuMuseum ) and get a page that lists all the ideas you have posted. You can send the web address (URL) of this page to people you'd like feedback from
5. On each idea page (e.g. the School Journal idea) there is a "Share this idea" button. Use this feature grab a banner advert and link so you can promote your ideas on your website or blog
6. Once you have gathered customer feedback you can use the Make it Digital Scorecard to help make decisions about what to digitise

If you do use these tools to support your digitisation planning, we'd love to hear about it. Drop us a note at advice@digitalnz.org.

Why can't I vote on an idea?

We've designed the voting tool so that visitors only have one vote per idea. Some visitor who share PCs, like at internet cafes or Schools, may however find that that they can't vote on every idea or that the voting icon is already green. This is because the voting tool uses cookies on your computer to remember the previous selections... and someone must have already voted on the idea. You can remove this restriction by clearing your cookies.

We set up this restriction to try and provide an accurate view of the demand, while also making it easy for people to get involved i.e. you don't have to register or login to vote. Please don't abuse this cookie feature :-) Thanks!