In New Zealand, resilience isn’t optional.

With earthquakes, landslides, and storms a part of life here in New Zealand, building and maintaining resilient infrastructure is as much about foresight as it is about recovery. What if the tools we need in emergencies were already in everyday use? What if we didn’t have to build new systems during a crisis because they were already in place?

That’s the idea behind a growing set of open, federated geospatial tools that are transforming how infrastructure is planned, built, and maintained across Aotearoa.

The 2011 Christchurch earthquakes fractured the city – literally and organisationally. As agencies mobilised to rebuild, coordination quickly became a critical issue. Who was working where? Which projects were clashing? How could a city be rebuilt efficiently when no one had the full picture?

To answer these questions, the National Forward Works Viewer (NFWV) was born – a shared map of all planned civil works. It helped teams from multiple organisations to coordinate timeframes, reduce clashes, and avoid rework. It was built fast, out of necessity – but it worked, and saved tens of millions in avoidable costs. From that crucible, the idea emerged that this shouldn’t be a one-time fix. It should be the new normal.

Today, the NFWV is no longer a recovery tool. It’s used by over 500 organisations including councils, utility providers, and transport agencies – as part of their daily operations. Whether it's resurfacing roads, replacing pipes, laying fibre, or planning major events like marathons and parades, the Forward Works Viewer helps agencies see each other’s plans and work together.

But the NFWV is just the beginning.

It’s part of a growing ecosystem of open, geospatial tools. Alongside the NFWV are two other national tools, which have been built not to hoard data – but to connect it.

One of these tools is the New Zealand Underground Asset Register (NZUAR), which brings visibility to what lies beneath our cities. Piloted in Wellington NZ, it federates subsurface utility data into a common schema giving planners and contractors visibility of underground pipes and cables. It helps prevent asset strikes, protects lives, and improves the information that asset owners receive from the field. Just like the NFWV, it operates on the principle that better decisions come from shared, trusted information – especially when it’s about what can’t be seen.

The third tool is the upcoming National Geospatial Catalogue, which federates critical contextual data – like ground conditions, contamination risks, heritage overlays, and more – into a searchable map layer available alongside the NFWV and NZUAR. Instead of scattered datasets across siloed agencies, the catalogue will create a nationwide view of risks and constraints that affect infrastructure delivery and resilience planning.

Together, these three tools – NFWV, NZUAR, and the Geospatial Catalogue – form a shared picture of digital infrastructure for Aotearoa. All are built on open-source geospatial software, chosen for its interoperability, transparency, and freedom from licensing barriers. But this openness isn’t just a technical choice – it’s a civic principle. public data, public tools, and public infrastructure should be available for public good.

That’s why these platforms are governed by the Digital Built Aotearoa Foundation (DBAF) – a charitable trust formed in 2023 to steward this ecosystem of open data. DBAF operates on a cost-recovery model, reinvesting any surplus into improving the tools, building new features, and keeping subscription costs low. Its independence means it can act as a neutral, non-commercial custodian of data shared between public and private actors – fostering collaboration, not competition.

The Foundation’s work has been recognised by the NZ Infrastructure Commission as addressing a problem of national importance - and now included on their Infrastructure Priorities Programme for further investigation. The digital ecosystem is also supporting the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) in the development of a pilot national electricity outage map to improve emergency readiness and response. These are not side projects – they are signs that this ecosystem is becoming core national infrastructure.

And crucially, the model is scalable. None of the tools require centralised databases. Instead, they use data federation and schema alignment to map disparate datasets into a unified view. Organisations retain their own data and control, while contributing to a greater whole. This is what makes the system work – technically, politically, and culturally.

The map-based user-friendly design makes them accessible to all users – allowing organisations to spatialise their data, validate inputs, and generate insights without needing complex software or deep expertise. It brings the power of spatial analysis to non-spatial users, which in turn improves data quality and engagement across the board.

New Zealand’s story is a global one in disguise. Every country faces infrastructure challenges. Every community faces disasters, whether acute or slow-moving. But the lesson from Aotearoa is this: if we build the right tools for emergency response, and we embed them into everyday workflows, then we build resilience every day – even when the ground isn’t shaking.

For the FOSS4G community, this is a story of what’s possible when open-source meets public need. It’s about designing systems that are federated, open, and governed in the public interest. And it’s about recognising that disaster resilience is not a feature – it’s an outcome of everything we do.

This presentation will take the audience on the journey of how Digital Built Aotearoa’s open geospatial ecosystem evolved from emergency response into essential national infrastructure. It will explore why open principles, federated data, and public-good governance were critical design choices, and how these tools enable coordination across hundreds of organisations without centralising control. The presentation will also discuss the real-world technical and organisational challenges of building federated systems at national scale, including schema design, data standardisation, and stakeholder trust. Finally, it will reflect on New Zealand’s unique context of frequent natural disasters and how this shaped the foundational thesis: systems built for disaster recovery must be pre-embedded in everyday infrastructure planning to deliver true resilience. The underlying principles of openness, federation, and public stewardship, which are widely transferable, offer a model for other jurisdictions looking to improve infrastructure delivery, emergency readiness, and cross-sector collaboration.