Civic Intelligence Infrastructure
Spatial knowledge for the places that matter - built by the communities who know them.
Community organisations across Aotearoa hold irreplaceable knowledge about the places they care for. Digital Reef turns that knowledge into shared spatial infrastructure - visible, structured, and ready to use.
See what's happening across Aotearoa
Government notices, consent applications, emergency alerts, and community events - all mapped in one place. No algorithms. No personal data trade-offs. No need to join dozens of groups to know what's happening in your area.
Loading map...
About Digital Reef
Here's the problem:
Recreation clubs, conservation trusts, and community groups hold irreplaceable knowledge about the places they care for. Informal tracks. Seasonal conditions. Access patterns. Cultural significance. Hard-won operational intelligence. But almost none of it exists in the spatial data that planners rely on and make decisions with. When a consent application threatens your river access, the evidence isn't there. When a Fast Track project affects your launch site, your knowledge isn't visible. When key people move on, decades of institutional memory walk out the doors. The Digital Reef solves this problem by creating a platform that brings all this information together in one place for community organisations to access.
The Digital Reef Changes That
We provide shared civic technology infrastructure that wellbeing and recreational groups could never build independently: spatial data systems, civic notice monitoring, and field data collection tools - all governed by data sovereignty principles that keep your organisation in control.
The Result:
What communities value becomes defensible evidence. Smaller organisations benefit from shared tools. Local knowledge persists in durable, usable forms. You now can have a say in what happens to your special recreational spaces.
Three capabilities. One platform.
Digital Reef combines capabilities that don't currently exist in Aotearoa
See What You Need with Nemo
Early warning and public noticeboard
Nemo is a public noticeboard for all of Aotearoa — mapped. Government notices, consent applications, emergency alerts, and recreation events from subscribing organisations, all in one place. No algorithms deciding what you see. No personal data traded for access. No need to join dozens of Facebook groups to know what's happening in your area. Just a clear, spatial picture of what's happening in and to the places you care about. Get one aggregated feed from Nemo — geocoded, classified, and filtered by the places that matter to you.
Try the demo ›Map it with the GIS platform
Layers of meaning, built to professional standards
Authoritative base maps and structured spatial data showing where communities gather, recreate, respond, and care for place so you can access, contribute to, and build upon spatial data your organisation couldn't develop alone. Interactive maps for browsers and mobile. Real-time visibility. Your layers, your control over who sees what. Professional-grade layers that integrate with ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, and council GIS environments. Layers of meaning, built to professional standards.
Build with Aronnax
From scattered knowledge to useable operational & on-the-ground data
Most community organisations don't have GIS capability. Aronnax is an incubator that bridges that gap — taking community organisations from scattered local knowledge to operational spatial datasets and mapped places. Capture geolocated observations in the field — photos, audio, notes, structured data. Spatial assets you can build over time to create institutional knowledge that persists when people move on.
Try the demo ›Each tool reinforces the others. Field data enriches your GIS layers. Spatial claims enable smarter notice alerting. The platform is more than the sum of its parts.
The Problems We Solve
Invisible Affordance
Wellbeing affordances (assets and resources) — recreation use, access patterns, cultural significance, community connection — are systematically underrepresented in spatial data. Planning decisions proceed without evidence of what communities value, because that evidence was never captured in forms planners can use.
Never Miss Out on a Civic Notice
Civic notices that affect your places are scattered across council websites, the New Zealand Gazette, DOC alerts, Fast Track applications, and more. Each has its own format, update frequency, and discovery mechanism. Community groups with volunteer capacity have almost no chance of catching notices within submission windows. By the time you hear about a notice that affects your community it might be too late. We've created one single place to sign up to these notices so you never miss out.
Minimising Knowledge Loss
Informal tracks, local hazards, seasonal conditions, and hard-won historical operational knowledge disappear when key people move on. Organisations lose institutional memory because it was never captured in durable, shareable form. We've solved that problem by creating a unique platform that retains the information over time.
Disproportionate Capacity & Resourcing
Developers and applicants come to the table with professional planners, legal support, and specialist software. Most community groups are run by volunteers fitting it in around work and family and do not necessarily have the capacity and resources to read, submit and fight for what they need but are ultimately affected by the decision making process. We are changing that by giving community groups and those without “professional” resourcing a say with the right knowledge and tools, levelling the playing field.
Today in the Reef
Evidence Quality in Fast-Track Decision Making: The Waitaha Case
26 January 2026
Examining how evidence quality frameworks apply to fast-track consenting processes in Aotearoa - lessons from the Waitaha case.
Read More ›Join us
Digital Reef is in its early stages, and this is a rare moment. Founding members shape what we build, how we prioritise, and which domains we develop first. Membership is designed for community organisations of all sizes. We are a charity - our goal is to make these tools accessible, not exclusive.
We are also seeking trustees to join the Board - people with experience in geospatial systems, outdoor recreation, environmental management, community development, or governance who want to help build infrastructure that serves communities. If that sounds like you, apply to become a trustee.