Yearly Archives: 2015

Ruby web scraping tutorial on morph.io – Part 1, setting up your scraper

By Luke Bacon | Published: October 13, 2015

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials.   With just a few lines of code, you can write a scraper […]

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Matthew and the Digital Transformation Office

By Matthew Landauer | Published: October 5, 2015

The Digital Transformation Office was established in July of this year, by the then Minister, now Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, to transform government and make government services simpler, clearer, faster and more humane. The cornerstone of this huge endeavour is putting users first. Design and build government services for people, not for government and all […]

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Civic Tech Monthly, September 2015

By Luke Bacon | Published: September 25, 2015

Welcome to the eighth edition of Civic Tech Monthly. Below you’ll find news and notes about civic tech from Australia and around the world. As always we’d love to see you at the OpenAustralia Foundation Sydney Pub Meet next Tuesday if you’re in town. Come along and give a lightning talk about something interesting in […]

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A massive week for They Vote For You

By Luke Bacon | Published: September 24, 2015

Forget what politicians say. What truly matters is what they do. And what they do is vote, to write our laws which affect us all. — They Vote For You Australia got a new Prime Minister last week. As the media detailed the step by step drama, tens of thousands of people visited and shared […]

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Web scraping workshop success—we’re doing it again in October!

By Luke Bacon | Published: September 24, 2015

Earlier this month we ran our first Introduction to Web Scraping Workshop and it was a big success! We had 6 wonderful attendees. By the afternoon everyone had written a scraper to collect data from the web. You can read more about how it went on information graphics designer Kelly Tall’s blog. We’re looking forward […]

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Civic Tech Monthly, August 2015

By Luke Bacon | Published: August 20, 2015

Welcome to the seventh edition of Civic Tech Monthly. Below you’ll find news and notes about civic tech from Australia and around the world. It seems like August has been a busy month for civic hackers everywhere because this month we’ve got a bunch of new projects from around the world for you. As always […]

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Introduction to Web Scraping Workshop in Sydney

By Luke Bacon | Published: August 7, 2015

Web scraping is a flexible and powerful technique to collect data for your projects. You can use a scraper to quickly grab all kinds of information for analysis and processing. Scrapers are the backbone of our projects such as They Vote For You and PlanningAlerts— we’re always finding new ways that scrapers can help. There’s […]

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Civic Tech Monthly, July 2015

By Henare Degan | Published: July 24, 2015

Welcome to the sixth edition of Civic Tech Monthly. Below you’ll find news and notes about civic tech from Australia and around the world. It’s been very cold here in Sydney. People were even snowboarding down the main street of Katoomba, where our co-founders live. Maybe that means people have been hibernating because this month […]

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Another 2 million people can get PlanningAlerts

By Luke Bacon | Published: July 3, 2015

Another 2 million people in Australia now have a simple way to impact development in their local area. Last month the OpenAustralia Foundation teamed up with a group of volunteer engineers from Google and have expanded the availability of our project PlanningAlerts to 21 more local council areas. The event was part of the GoogleServe […]

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Civic Tech Monthly, June 2015

By Henare Degan | Published: June 26, 2015

Welcome to the fifth edition of Civic Tech Monthly. Below you’ll find news and notes about civic tech from Australia and around the world. It was our 7th birthday this month (yay!) so we hope you’ll indulge us a little while we share a little more news about ourselves than usual. That also gives us […]

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