Welcome to the GovTech Community
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to our new home. If you've just arrived from our Teams channel, thank you for making the jump. This post is part welcome mat, part explanation of why we've moved, and part invitation to get stuck in. A community with a decade behind it This isn't a new idea — it's a new venue for an old one. For more than ten years, the Microsoft Wellington office has hosted a GovTech community: sessions, briefings, hallway conversations and the kind of "how did you actually solve that?" exchanges that never make it into a formal case study. People have come through this community as graduates and come back as architects. Agencies have found each other here and gone on to share work rather than duplicate it. That history is the point. We're not starting from zero, we're changing the room we meet in. Why Tech Community Teams served us well, but it has limits for a community like ours. Conversations scrolled away. Good answers were buried three weeks deep in a thread. New members arrived to an empty scroll-back with no way to find the thing everyone else already knew. Tech Community fixes most of that. Posts are searchable and permanent. Questions and their answers stay findable for the next person who hits the same wall. Articles have room to breathe. And critically, it's open — colleagues across agencies can join without needing to be added to anything. What we'd love to see here Everything, honestly. But specifically: Questions. Especially the ones you think are too basic to ask. They almost never are, and someone else is quietly wondering the same thing. Articles and write-ups. Migrated something? Piloted something? Abandoned something and learned why? Write it up. The failures are often more useful than the wins, and there's far too little of that shared openly across the sector. Ideas and problems. Half-formed is fine. Some of the best work that's come out of this community started as someone thinking out loud. Events. We'll keep running them, and we'll post them here first — sessions, deep dives, and the informal catch-ups that have always been the backbone of this group. Getting started Introduce yourself in the comments below. Tell us who you are, which agency you're with, and what you're working on or curious about right now. That's it — no formality required. If you have a question waiting, don't sit on it. Post it. A community reads as alive or dead within about a week of launching, and the difference is entirely down to whether people start talking. So please, start talking. Looking forward to seeing what we build here together.
