Councils Project

There are 73 territorial authorities in New Zealand. Each of them maintains information about a variety of businesses, largely for environmental health reasons.

Some of these businesses include


 * food premises (anywhere that serves food)
 * hairdressers
 * camping grounds
 * funeral directors
 * tattoo & skin piercing parlours
 * on/off/club licensed premises
 * toilets
 * public libraries
 * public swimming pools
 * cemeteries
 * refuse transfer stations & landfills

The councils should release this information to an Official Information Request. There is a great discussion about how to use the OIA here http://www.medialawjournal.co.nz/?page_id=30

A template request could look like

Hi, Can you please provide a current digital file (preferably an excel spreadsheet) which includes the trading name, address & license type (e.g. food premise, campground, funeral director etc) of premises currently issued Environmental Health Licences by the council.

This information will be geocoded, deduped, cleaned and added to the www.zenbu.co.nz NZ local search engine, where the content is freely available to the public under a Creative Commons license.

Kind regards,

If the council want to charge you they have to tell you up front at which time you can choose whether to proceed.

This request will not cover toilets, pools, libraries or cemeteries; these might have to be a separate project.

We can collect contact details and final numbers here to avoid duplication of effort.

Once the council has provided the information, we need to get it into a basic spreadsheet format to upload into the site. Contact admin@zenbu.co.nz for help with this step.