Another embarrassing lesson for the ICT and Digital industry when working with the New Zealand government. If you don’t consider Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti with digital projects you could unintentionally discriminate against Māori, Treaty and in this case legislation that protects and enhances the Māori Language.
The New Zealand Covid app provided by the Ministry of Health, discriminates against Māori language and ignores Te Tiriti by not recognising macrons in email addresses, despite being in .nz since 2009 and globally for a number of years.
It also shows a bias with the developers and project governance who only consider English language speakers, despite New Zealand being in the Asia Pacific region where English is not the majority language.
The technical community have stated to me that “The default components of most web dev frameworks don’t support IDN email addresses”. This is no excuse. There are lots of sources of code that do, so there is no need to write your own. My personal experience in a University IT department with a complex architecture it was a quick and low risk implementation.
This oversight would have been avoided if using my recent publication Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti and Māori Ethics Guidelines for: AI, Algorithms, Data and IOT freely available from https://www.taiuru.co.nz/tiritiethicalguide/
The project should have been co-governed, co-designed and co tested with Māori.
Leave a Reply