I can feel this coming together…

Well - what a week

I have had so many awesome conversations this week - its hard to know where to begin.

Numbers and Stories

Lets start with this - an excellent article on NZ’s own voting tribes (paywalled) - by Danyl McLaughlin in the Listener published this Tuesday 10 March.

I caught with up Danyl this morning - who had drawn his inspiration similarly from the work of More In Common - this time their research from the USA in 2019 called Hidden Tribes.

His article is built around 4 or 5 cycles of NZ Election Election Study data - to build a set of around 10,000 respondents data that allowed him to undertake a similar segmentation of the New Zealand population.

I’m meeting some from that NZES team soon I hope to understand more and see how we might link up. They have data going back till 1990 - the penultimate election in New Zealand under First Past The Post before we changed to Mixed Member Proportional from 1996.

People and Places

Next. A series of catch ups with some other ex-public servants here in Wellington - each experts in their field.

One from the old Te Arawhiti | The Office for Māori Crown Relations, another who has held senior roles in MBIE and Justice, and a third who was a senior leader in Health during COVID-19 where we worked together.

All of them have given me great ideas to get further momentum behind this, and each has made offer to connect me with who I need to.

They have all also helped me test the idea more deeply, and refine both my thinking and description of what I am building here at Our Tomorrow NZ.

And each of them has said they think there is something to this - and they can see even more use cases for it than I had thought of.

So feeling good about continuing to push on.

I’ve also found my second volunteer - someone with experience in strategy and planning who will help me map out deliveries and dependencies through till the General Election. That is frankly awesome and just the sort of help I need at the moment.

And finally that lunch with someone in the Angel community here in Wellington. They’ve agreed to help me tighten up my pitch deck and then get that to a potential funder soon. So that’ll be a task for next week

But first - I’m off to Sydney on Sunday - back late Tuesday.

I’m super excited about this trip where I’ll be meeting Tim Dixon who founded More in Common in the UK after 2016.

I’m really hoping to learn as much as I can from him about their own startup journey - and what it is that has helped them survive and thrive for a decade as they have expanded to another 6 countries.

I looking forward to spit-balling with another data geek - and discussing the emerging opportunities around AI in polling and synthetic audiences - and test my ideas out against his much deeper experience.

Hopefully we’ll be able to work closely together going forward.

So - I may not get to my next blog till later next week

But it feels for sure like momentum is growing - and my dream, just maybe, is starting to take shape.

Ka kite - have a great weekend