Yearly Archives: 2009

Launching our new website: Planning Alerts

By Matthew Landauer | Published: December 21, 2009

You might have noticed we’ve been fairly quiet of late. Well, that’s because we’ve been hard at work putting together a new website called Planning Alerts which we’re launching today. Planning Alerts: Email alerts of planning applications near you We’re really excited and proud to share this with you! You’d probably know if your next […]

Posted in Announcement, PlanningAlerts.org.au | 8 Responses

Two great hackfest days!

By Matthew Landauer | Published: November 12, 2009

(Cross posted to the offical Google Australia Blog) Last weekend, OpenAustralia held its second hackfest at Google’s Sydney office. If you haven’t come across OpenAustralia.org before, it’s a volunteer run website which helps you to find out what your representatives get up to in parliament with the aim of bridging the growing democratic disconnect that […]

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OpenAustralia Hackfest – MashupAustralia Edition

By Henare Degan | Published: October 14, 2009

The OpenAustralia Foundation and Google invite you to this free all-weekend hacking extravaganza for anyone interested in creating a mashup for the MashupAustralia competition or hacking on the OpenAustralia website. Build a cool application using data from http://data.australia.gov.au, enter it into the MashupAustralia competition and and you’re in with a chance to win prizes, including […]

Posted in Announcement, Development | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Response

The ups and downs of funding new projects

By Matthew Landauer | Published: October 10, 2009

About two months ago we put in an application for funding to the auDA Foundation for a new project called “Planning Alerts”. The ideas is simple. Wouldn’t it be great if you could go to a website and put in your email address and where you live and get updates of any development applications in […]

Posted in Announcement, Development | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Responses

Fox Force Five: OpenAustralia, eDemocracy and Education

By Matthew Landauer | Published: October 4, 2009

I’ve been a volunteer with OpenAustralia for some time now, and I don’t think I’ve talked enough about why I admire this project so much, and why I think it’s so important. It’s because I believe in transparent, accountable and accessible government. It’s because I believe in removing the obstacles which keep people from participating […]

Posted in Media, OpenAustralia.org | Comments closed

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

By Matthew Landauer | Published: September 9, 2009

One Sunday morning, a bit over two weeks ago, Kat, busy putting the finishing touches to her article on transparency for the Centre for Policy Development‘s group submission to the government 2.0 taskforce “Upgrading Democracy” leans over to me and says: “How about we submit a Perl app to the taskforce as an essay in […]

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Melbourne’s first OpenAustralia hackfest

By Henare Degan | Published: September 8, 2009

OpenAustralia.org, Australia’s first eDemocracy website, would like to invite its friends, fans and volunteers to its first Melbourne hackfest. The first OpenAustralia hackfest, held in Sydney in June, was a big success, attracting 50 volunteers. We worked on solving existing problems as well as starting new OpenAustralia projects including a mobile version of OpenAustralia. We’re […]

Posted in Announcement | Tagged , , , | 1 Response

What is the OpenAustralia Foundation?

By Matthew Landauer | Published: September 3, 2009

As we promised earlier, we’ve now put the constitution online of our newly formed charity. This document describes in gory detail the rules of operation of the charity. Probably the most important part and certainly the most interesting are the “objects” which describe the big-picture guiding principles for the foundation’s actions. We worked with our […]

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The Network at the Heart of Democracy

By Matthew Landauer | Published: August 15, 2009

Last week Thursday I had the pleasure of presenting the opening keynote at the annual System Administrators Guild of Australia conference. I tried to create a historical context for what OpenAustralia is doing by looking at the time that the Westminster system, the political system that we have in Australia, was created. The Westminster system […]

Posted in Presentation | 1 Response

Government no show on Government 2.0 Taskforce

By Matthew Landauer | Published: August 14, 2009

Update: Since this post first appeared Ann Steward has now posted on the taskforce blog. A commendable part of the setup of the Government 2.0 Taskforce was a blog which in the nearly two months since its creation has become the primary means of communication between the taskforce and the general public. Now, let’s take […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 11 Responses