Making Aotearoa the most queer-friendly country on Earth

The trans person who felt uncomfortable but left without saying anything. The couple who chose not to come back. The regular who loves your place but has never told you why it matters to them.

QueerSpace gives you honest, structured feedback from queer customers about how they actually experience your business. Ratings cover five specific dimensions -- Safety, Respect, Competence, Environment, and Overall Inclusivity -- so you get actionable insight, not just a star rating. You can see where you're doing well and where there's room to grow.

This isn't about being perfect. It's about being willing to learn and improve. Businesses that engage with their feedback and take steps to be more inclusive are celebrated on the platform. We connect you with training and certification organisations -- Rainbow Tick, Pride Pledge, Gender Minorities Aotearoa, InsideOUT, and others -- who can help you understand what your customers need and how to deliver it.

We should be upfront about how this works: reviews are honest community feedback. Businesses cannot pay for better ratings. Honest reviews cannot be removed at a business's request. The platform serves the community first. That said, we take accuracy seriously. If a review is factually wrong or violates our community guidelines, there are clear processes for addressing that.

Here's the bigger picture. Aggregated, anonymised trends from reviews across the country help advocacy organisations and government understand where things are working and where they're not. Your improvement contributes to a larger shift.

When businesses across Aotearoa commit to being more inclusive, the whole country moves forward. Your customers' privacy is protected absolutely. We never share individual reviews or customer identities with businesses. You see ratings and feedback, not who wrote them. That's how trust works -- for your customers and for you.

You take that responsibility seriously. But when it comes to understanding how these communities actually experience local businesses, services, and public spaces, the evidence base has significant gaps.

The data sources you currently rely on tell part of the story, but not enough:

QueerSpace fills this gap with ongoing, crowdsourced, anonymised data about real experiences at real businesses and services. The platform provides aggregated trend data across your region, including:

• Which types of services score well for inclusivity and which consistently fall short
• Which suburbs or areas have the highest concentration of low-scoring businesses
• Where investment in education and training programs would have the greatest impact
• How inclusivity scores trend over time, including in response to specific interventions or funding decisions

This is evidence you can act on. It helps you target resources effectively rather than relying on anecdote or waiting for the next periodic survey.

We share aggregated trends with local councils, health boards, and community organisations. Individual reviews, ratings, and user identities are never shared. The privacy protections are absolute.

The broader picture matters here. Aotearoa New Zealand's legal protections for rainbow communities are strong -- 88/100 on the Equaldex Legal Index. But lived experience doesn't always match the law. QueerSpace provides the evidence layer that connects policy intent to real-world outcomes. Your region's data becomes part of the national picture that drives systemic improvement.

There's also a practical pathway that doesn't require council intervention. Businesses in your region that engage with their reviews and connect with training organisations improve their scores over time. This creates a positive cycle that benefits your community. QueerSpace provides the feedback loop. Training organisations provide the capability. Businesses do the work. Your role is to understand the trends and support the ecosystem.

For health specifically, provider ratings help your public health unit understand where gender-affirming healthcare is working well and where provider competency needs investment. When community members rate healthcare providers on Competence and Respect, that data reveals gaps that clinical audits simply cannot capture.

You know the stories. You know which services are failing the community and which ones are getting it right. What you haven't had is ongoing, structured, place-level evidence to back up what you already know.

The data landscape in Aotearoa tells a clear story about what's available and what's missing:

What none of these frameworks capture is ongoing, crowdsourced, place-specific evidence about how queer people actually experience businesses, services, and public spaces. That's the gap QueerSpace fills.

The platform produces aggregated, anonymised trend data showing which types of businesses score well across the country, which regions have significant gaps, where things are measurably improving, and where they're getting worse. This isn't anecdote. It's structured data from thousands of real experiences, updated continuously.

This is the evidence that makes your policy conversations harder to dismiss. When you can show a health board that gender-affirming healthcare providers in their region score 2.1 out of 5 on Competence while providers two regions over score 4.3, that's a different conversation than "we've heard concerns." When you can show a city council that inclusivity scores in their CBD have declined 15% over two years while a neighbouring city improved, that's evidence they have to respond to.

We never share individual reviews, ratings, or user identities. What we publish and share with partner organisations is the bigger picture -- the patterns and trends that emerge when hundreds and thousands of individual experiences are brought together.

Your organisation's role in this ecosystem is central. QueerSpace provides the evidence. You provide the advocacy, the expertise, and the relationships with decision-makers. When a business wants to improve their inclusivity, we connect them with organisations like yours for training, education, and support. The platform creates the motivation. You provide the pathway.

We're working toward measurable goals that align with international frameworks you already reference: Aotearoa New Zealand's Equaldex Public Opinion Index rising above 80/100. Top 5 on the Williams Institute GAI. Improvement in the UNDP personal safety dimension. These are ambitious targets. Your work is central to achieving them. QueerSpace gives you a new tool to get there.

These are significant achievements. Aotearoa New Zealand's Equaldex Legal Index score is 88/100, reflecting one of the more comprehensive legal protection regimes globally.

But law and lived experience are different things. The Equaldex Public Opinion Index is 65/100. That 23-point gap between legal protection and social reality represents the distance policy has yet to travel.

International benchmarks tell a nuanced story

What is missing from the current evidence base is a framework that systematically captures ongoing, place-specific, experience-level data about how queer people interact with businesses, services, and public spaces. Periodic surveys capture snapshots. International indices capture national averages. Neither captures the granular, ongoing, localised reality.

QueerSpace addresses this gap. It is a crowdsourced platform where community members rate specific businesses and services across five dimensions: Safety, Respect, Competence, Environment, and Overall Inclusivity. Reviews are structured, moderated, and aggregated to produce trend data at regional and national levels.

The platform produces aggregated, anonymised trend data that can inform evidence-based policy development in several areas:

• Where existing legal protections are translating into positive lived experiences and where they are not
• Which sectors, regions, or service types have the most significant inclusivity gaps
• Whether targeted interventions -- training programs, policy changes, funding decisions -- are producing measurable improvement over time
• How Aotearoa New Zealand's experiential outcomes compare to its legal and attitudinal rankings internationally

Privacy protections are designed to the standard required by the NZ Privacy Act 2020. User location is never stored more precisely than suburb level. GPS coordinates are used for real-time map display only and are never persisted. Anonymous participation is fully supported. Individual reviews, ratings, and user identities are never published or shared outside the platform. Only aggregated, anonymised trends are shared with research organisations, government agencies, and advocacy groups.

The theory of change operates at two levels simultaneously. At the individual level, community members share experiences, which provides other community members with information to make safer choices. At the systemic level, community-sourced experiential data strengthens the evidence base for advocacy organisations, which supports evidence-based policy development. In parallel, businesses that receive feedback through the platform connect with training organisations and improve their practices, creating a direct pathway from individual experience to institutional change that does not depend solely on legislative intervention.

QueerSpace's long-term success metrics align with existing international frameworks: Equaldex Public Opinion Index rising above 80/100 nationally. Aotearoa New Zealand entering the top 5 on the Williams Institute Global Acceptance Index. Measurable improvement in the UNDP personal security dimension. Sustained improvement in inclusivity scores across regions and service sectors. These are ambitious but measurable targets that complement Aotearoa New Zealand's existing commitments to equity and wellbeing.