Why are the Impact and Population libraries publicly available?

The Impact and Population libraries draw on data available in the public domain. This is because they have been produced using output from Stats NZ’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) and published by NZ Government agencies.

Research produced in Stats NZ’s IDI (and therefore data output) must be in the interest of public good and research, and as such any work Nicholson Consulting produce in the IDI is published publicly for use by researchers. This includes all data, code, and research reports and findings.

Data published by NZ Government agencies is available in the public domain, usually under a licence for use.

Where can I find them?

The data for these libraries is currently available on Nicholson Consulting’s GitHub page.

Any future reports or presentations using this data will be sent to Stats NZ to be shared with the research community in the microdata research storehouse.

What license are the Impact and Population libraries created by Nicholson Consulting published with?

The data that makes up the Impact and Population libraries created by Nicholson Consulting in the IDI has been published on Nicholson Consulting’s GitHub page with a Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal license.

Note this data (IDI output) is also used for other purposes within Nicholson Consulting including research on fiscal and economic outcomes for New Zealanders.

Details of what can be done with this license are available here but in summary this means this data can be used freely for sharing or adapting, even for commercial purposes, and does not require attribution.

A full guide on choosing licenses for software, data or documentation can be found here.

What about data for the Impact and Population libraries not created by Nicholson Consulting?

In the first version of the Impact Lab data published by NZ Treasury has also been used for the Impact Lab Impact library.

This information was taken from CBAx and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license:

This is slightly different from the Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal license as it requires attribution, but like the 0 license, places no restrictions on sharing or adapting (even for commercial use).

In future the Impact Lab Impact and Population Libraries may also use data from the IDI created by the NZ Treasury published in the Insights tool here.

This is also published under a Creative Commons 4 license and requires attribution.

The Impact Lab may also draw on other publicly available government data. In the event of this proper adherence to any licenses will be followed.

Some data and information used in the SROI calculations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. It is attributed to the NZ Treasury.