The Digital Built Aotearoa Foundation was created in 2023. Initially established to provide a national, neutral home for the NZ Forward Works Viewer, in partnership with Wellington City Council it’s now the home of the Underground Asset Register, and will expand to become a repository of knowledge across the infrastructure sector, with a specific focus on collaboration and disaster recovery to improve infrastructure resilience.
To encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing from lessons learned to enable and improve infrastructure resilience throughout Aotearoa
Beautifully rugged, remote, geographically diverse and with a strong cultural and national identity, it is a unique land. But with our incredible geography comes susceptibility to natural disasters and climate change. Aotearoa is taonga we need to protect.
As a country we’ve amassed vast amounts of knowledge from our experiences in disaster recovery within the infrastructure sector.
We’ve built tools, collected data and developed processes – but once the recovery phase is over, tools are switched off and life goes on, and all knowledge gained is not necessarily shared.
To address this, the Digital Built Aotearoa Foundation was set up in 2023. It’s a place to act as a repository of digitally collated information of the built environment. Our aim is to be a neutral entity to host and publish national infrastructure data via the National Forward Works Viewer, and to enable collaboration and knowledge sharing to improve infrastructure resilience throughout Aotearoa.
Let’s not be gatekeepers of knowledge.
Collating and using information on the built environment in peace time allows us easy access to when we will need it most.
Trust Chair
Matt runs The Garage Business Consultants, who provide advice to government organisations on the design and delivery of large infrastructure projects. He has vast experience in infrastructure delivery and recovery, having been part of the commercial team for both the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquake recover projects. He is also currently advising on the establishment of the East Coast recovery alliances following Cyclone Gabrielle.
Matt is also a special advisor to a project run by Massey University, sponsored by MBIE, which looks at national capability for infrastructure delivery. Matt’s professional interests align well with the DBAF goals and the National Forward Works Viewer.
“I want us to stop reinventing the wheel every time there’s a new disaster or large infrastructure programme, and instead start looking at opportunities to standardise the way we work across the sector, and promote open-data for the benefit of the communities we serve”
Trust Secretary
Greg is the manager of the Building Innovation Partnership, an initiative sponsored by MBIE and located at the University of Canterbury. The BIP is an industry-led research programme to improve the whole-of-life performance of infrastructure. Greg’s been a sounding board for the NFWV for some time and is very happy to be officially part of the journey by being a Trustee for the Digital Built Aotearoa Foundation.
The structure of the Digital Built Aotearoa Foundation is below.
This is likely to evolve as we grow.
The National Forward Works Viewer is Aotearoa’s online map of planned infrastructure works. It allows users to upload their planned work programmes to one central map, accessible to different organisations, to create a single authoritative repository of mapped forward work programmes.
With built in clash/opportunity detection, and the ability to overlay additional geospatial data to improve context of the area, it quickly becomes a powerful tool to enable organisations to coordinate and collaborate with one another to improve project sequencing and timelines.
This results in savings in both time, money and reputation.
The Underground Asset Register is Aotearoa’s first online map of federated underground assets in one central location. Historically, underground asset information has been held by asset owners in various formats and locations. The UAR seeks to bring this information together into a simple and easy to understand format in one central location.
We are working with Wellington City Council and asset owners in the region to publish assets onto the map. Utility data is displayed on the map with interactive tools so users can understand what assets exist in their area of interest, who the asset owners are, and how to contact them. The UAR also provides a convenient mechanism for providing feedback when a user find something in the wrong place, or something that isn’t recognised. This feedback is provided to the utilities and to WCC to support updating the data sets that feed into the map.