Yearly Archives: 2014

Email is your secret weapon

By Matthew Landauer | Published: December 18, 2014

(Cross posted from the Poplus.org blog) Earlier this year I was lucky enough to attend PoplusCon in Santiago, Chile. It was a remarkable experience spending two very intense days working through problems, sharing experience and knowledge, and making connections with incredibly talented civic tech coders and activists from around the world. If you were lucky […]

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Luke and Henare talk They Vote For You on FBi’s Backchat

By Henare Degan | Published: December 16, 2014

On Saturday Luke and I were really glad to be invited on FBi radio’s excellent Backchat programme. You can listen to the podcast here: Thanks for having us, FBi!

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Designing They Vote For You

By Luke Bacon | Published: December 8, 2014

For the last three and a half months I’ve been working with the OpenAustralia Foundation to design their latest project, They Vote For You. For me, as always, this was a broad interpretation of the role “designer”: digging into functionality, language, information architecture, appearance, feeling, right down to the purpose and direction of the site. […]

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How your MP votes, now on OpenAustralia.org

By Henare Degan | Published: December 3, 2014

OpenAustralia.org is ancient by internet standards. When it was created 7 years ago Twitter had just launched. There was no Instagram. Or GitHub. After all this time it keeps chugging along, still making our Parliament more accessible and understandable. Today is a rare and happy day when we add something new to the venerable site. […]

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How do you edit division summaries?

By Mackay Ash | Published: December 2, 2014

There are many ways to edit division summaries. Here, I’m going to explain an approach that’s worked well for me. Choose a division First, I choose a division to summarise. I like to choose divisions that are relevant to policies that I’ve created, such as For decreasing availability of welfare payments. This means I often […]

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Keep an eye on the policies that matter to you

By Henare Degan | Published: December 1, 2014

Believe it or not there is no easy to understand explanation of every vote in our Federal Parliament. That’s why They Vote For You relies on the hard work of people like you to summarise votes and research Policies so that we can all better understand how our MPs are voting on our behalf. Largely […]

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Show your support for FOI laws today!

By Kat Szuminska | Published: November 26, 2014

  Today you have an opportunity to support effective Freedom of Information (FOI) laws in Australia. If you support strong FOI legislation then you really can do something to help, and you have to do it today! Tomorrow the Senate will be voting on a Bill which we at the OpenAustralia Foundation believe will undermine […]

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Submission for the “Inquiry into the Freedom of Information Amendment (New Arrangements) Bill 2014”

By Kat Szuminska | Published: November 18, 2014

    The Secretary of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee recently invited The OpenAustralia Foundation to make a submission on their Inquiry into the Freedom of Information Amendment (New Arrangements). These amendments make it harder and more expensive to argue the case if and when agencies refuse requests for information under FOI law. This makes […]

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They Vote For You

By Matthew Landauer | Published: October 21, 2014

We believe everyone should know what our politicians do on our behalf in parliament. If we don’t, how can we hold them to account meaningfully? How can we begin to talk to them about what we want them to do? Trust in politicians is at an all time low. Yet we live in a time […]

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And what a hackfest it was

By Henare Degan | Published: October 3, 2014

September 15th is The International Day of Democracy and this year also marked the start of the Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW). GLOW is a week of openness activities around the world, with events hosted by the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership and members of the parliamentary openness community. To celebrate […]

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