The Ambassador role
In May 2026 Anthropic selected me as a Claude Community Leader. I wrote back the same week arguing for more scope: Wellington is New Zealand's capital, its civic, policy, and tech communities overlap more tightly than almost anywhere, and with roughly 10,000 public sector roles going in the region, AI literacy had just become a live civic question. Anthropic agreed and made the role Ambassador.
Wellington Claude meetups
I co-organise Wellington's Claude community meetups, including an event with more than 230 attendees. The community brings together engineers, analysts, founders, and public sector people building with Claude across the region.
Wellington Claude Impact Lab, 8 August 2026
The purpose
One day, fifty builders, five real problem statements written by Wellington City Council's emergency management team, all on a single theme: improving the flow of information between communities and Council before and during an emergency.
The partners
The Lab was run in partnership with Creative HQ, Wellington's Council-owned innovation accelerator, and ZunoSmart Labs. Wellington City Council provided the venue, the problem statements, and subject-matter experts embedded in the teams. Mayor Andrew Little addressed the room before the demos.
The participation
- Applications
- Around 104 for 50 build seats, oversubscribed within days.
- Teams
- Ten teams of five, drafted for a mix of domain grounding and shipping ability; each problem tackled by two teams.
- Data
- 74 Council and regional datasets catalogued and made queryable in a public repo, with a dependency-free Python client and a browsable explorer.
The outputs
Ten working prototypes in a day, judged on the principle that usefulness beats polish. The winning entry, an emergency information triage tool, ran entirely on two small fine-tuned models hosted locally: no third-party LLM API, no per-token cost, and no external vendor dependency during an actual emergency. The team had understood the problem well enough to know that an emergency tool which fails when the internet does is not an emergency tool.
Public references
- wcc-emergency-gis-data on GitHub: the Lab's public data repo, with its browsable dataset explorer.
- The claudecommunity-nz GitHub organisation, where the ten team repos are public.
- ElementX's recap of the July 2026 Claude meetup, which welcomed me as New Zealand's newest Claude Ambassador and previewed the Impact Lab.
Running a meetup or building with Claude in New Zealand? Get in touch.