Monthly Archives: December 2014

Email is your secret weapon

(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

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

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

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?

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

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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