The MOE School Zones outline the enrolment zones for schools in New Zealand.

- Being able to use the data to mash up with other datasets to create compelling data visualisations.

- Allowing more people to view the zones and report issues with the data (The zone file has lots of small errors in it)

- Reducing the reliance on schoolzones.co.nz which is often offline and is a very old and unfriendly website to use.


Third parties could build better tools on top of the existing data exposing it to more users. This is especially relevant to property websites.

The dataset is currently tightly controlled by a third party commercial provider and we would like to see this managed by the MOE more closely. The dataset is also updated every week by MOE but only released every three months. Also when this data has been OIA requested the data is out of date immediately (http://koordinates.com/layer/743-nz-school-zones-sept-2010/) and this is not a good thing as people may rely on old data to make decisions.

Having this data as a free, open dataset would allow sites to keep up-to-date versions easily accessible by their users.