The New Zealand Tech Alliance is a group of independent technology associations from across New Zealand that work together to ensure a strong voice for technology.
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The collaborative nature of IoT
Last month our executive council chair, Kriv Naicker, and executive director, Alison Mackie, hosted our annual general meeting. We presented on the previous 12 months, our strategic vision, core activities for 2022-2023, welcomed the new executive council, and said some farewells.
Some of our notable achievements over the last 12 months is our work across other Tech Alliance groups including LocationTech, AI Forum, and BlockchainNZ. Our partnerships with other industry groups on projects, such as events, whitepapers, research, and working groups instills the collaborative nature of IoT and its importance as a technology.
Just over 12 months ago, we welcomed Alison Mackie as our executive director, who has taken our strategy and implemented a cadence of work to bring this vision to life and our community together. We hope 2023 will be full of more opportunities to engage with our wider community. If you have a desire to become part of a connected New Zealand, feel free to reach out to Alison to express your interest in any of our working groups.
Introducing our new executive council:
We are proud to welcome back many returning executive council members for another term, including Jonathan McFarlane (Spark), Sandra Laws (MBIE), as well as Kriv Naicker (Synaptec) who was voted back in as our executive council chair. We are also excited to announce Keagan Lehmann (GHD) as our new deputy chair. And on another special note, we give a warm welcome back to Sam Madanian (AUT) to the executive council.
Farewell to our departing council members:
We would also like to extend our sincere gratitude and farewell to our departing members of our executive council. Thank you to Jannat Maqbool (Ecosystm), Tristan Ilich (TUANZ), Andrew Carr (Auckland Transport), Shaun McBride (Thinkxtra) and Vimal Kumar (University of Waikato). Thank you for all your hard work within our council and working groups. We wish you well on your next ventures and no doubt we will continue to see your contribution to the wider alliance.
Join our executive council:
With the finalisation of our annual meeting, we still hold a few seats available for nomination throughout the year. Currently we have open seats on our executive council for the following: Major Corporate, Government, Other Corporate, as well as two independent seats. If you have interest in joining our executive council, please contact our executive director, Alison Mackie, for more information.
What’s Happening at IoT Alliance?
Ledger of Things Working Group
The executive councils of both Blockchain New Zealand and the IoT Alliance have identified synergies between the two organisations that could readily be implemented to deliver significant societal and commercial benefits to New Zealand and beyond.
By leveraging Blockchain’s decentralised ledger models in combination with IoT technologies, significant efficiency gains and security improvements could be realised by many industries – at speed and at low transaction cost.
The purpose of the Ledger of Things Working Group is to showcase the opportunities for alignment of IoT and blockchain technologies and to demonstrate how these integrated decentralised models can add value in the New Zealand context.
The Ledger of Things Working Group recently published their first community whitepaper. This whitepaper covers how IoT and distributed ledger technology could be implemented within the energy, water and supply chain logistics sector. To read the whitepaper, click here.
We are interested in covering more in the IoT and distributed ledger space! If you have expertise or interest in digital identity, cybersecurity, or location technology, please reach out to our team to be part of our next volume.
Smart Cities Working Group
The Smart Cities Working Group is a group of like-minded individuals who have been meeting regularly since May 2022 to discuss how IoT technology can be used to advance and assist the development of a smarter city environment. Members of this working group are all passionate about IoT technology and how this can be used to benefit and grow a city’s ecosystem. Together we have developed a set of deliverables which aim to establish key interest areas driving smart cities and match these to the creative solutions being developed by trail blazing IoT technology providers throughout New Zealand.
Our recent survey of the IoT community established the following areas of interest and range of solutions. As we only surveyed our database, it is natural that the results are limited, however, it still shows interesting insights and trends within the NZ IoT ecosystem. Check out our website for our survey results and keep an eye out for our upcoming case studies and future webinars.
If you would like to contribute to our research, you can still participate in our survey and we will update our results. We are also keen to produce case studies of our IoT ecosystem. If you would like to be interviewed and have your work in the smart city space published, please reach out to our team.
Ngā mihi nui,
Alison Mackie, NZ IoT Alliance Executive Director
Read More: IOT Alliance November News
