Yearly Archives: 2016

Adding your local councillors to PlanningAlerts

You may have heard that you can now use PlanningAlerts to discuss development applications with your local councillors. With over 5,000 councillors in Australia just gathering the data is a big job. We’ve already done that for about half the councils we currently cover but we need your help to collect the rest. How to […]

Posted in PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Matthew’s back: Improving the stability and scalability of the morph.io platform

I’m very happy to be back at the Foundation for a little stint now to get my hands dirty on some coding, something I haven’t had any opportunity to do over the last year. It’s funny how you can miss these things! As you might have noticed, I’ve been away from working on morph.io and […]

Posted in Announcement, Development, Morph | 1 Response

Setting sail for the second half of 2016

A couple of weeks ago we had our third planning session for 2016. These quarterly planning sessions allow us to reflect on the work we’ve been doing and make any adjustments we need during the year. This post is a little update on what we discussed and what we’ll be working on from July through […]

Posted in Planning | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ask Your Local Councillors

PlanningAlerts makes it easy to impact what happens to your local buildings, parks, streets, and infrastructure. Over the last 7 years almost 40,000 people have signed up for alerts and thousands of you have made official comments on development applications for everyone to see. But there are more ways to impact what gets built and […]

Posted in Announcement, PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Picking a focus for the final push on our current major project

A couple of weeks ago Kat and I spent some time working out how best to spend the remaining time on our latest major project: helping people impact local planning by making it easy for them to write to their local councillors through PlanningAlerts. I thought it would be useful for our team, and anyone […]

Posted in Development, PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

At the Edges of Art, Technology and Democracy

This is a guest post by the fantastic Alexandra Crosby, co-founder of Fontyard in Marrickville. Alexandra joined us at our recent Hackfest at their space and made thoughtful contributions to the group redesigning street development application notices. The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, […]

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Response

Prototyping better development notices at the OpenAustralia Hackfest

Last month, the OpenAustralia Foundation ran a Hackfest, at the end of their two week-long residency at Frontyard in Marrickville. On the day, a group of us decided to take a look at the notices posted at properties with proposed development applications. You’ll have seen them before: they’re often bright green, tied to fences, and […]

Posted in Event, PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Our response to the ‘Electronic voting in the House of Representatives’ Report

Back in March, we submitted our views to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Procedure’s inquiry into electronic voting. And their Final Report is out now! Our submission outlined the benefits that electronic voting could bring by creating a fuller voting record, which increases accountability and transparency. Unfortunately, the Committee didn’t quite see it […]

Posted in OpenAustralia Foundation, They Vote For You | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Rebels in the ranks? Hardly.

Members of parliamentary parties rarely cross the floor, because parties expect loyalty from their team members. … [Crossing the floor] may be seen to be giving greater preference to the needs of the electorate than the needs of the party. … A member of parliament who crosses the floor may be considered a traitor to […]

Posted in OpenAustralia Foundation, They Vote For You | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What we’ve got planned for 2016

A few weeks ago we had our second planning session of 2016. As we mentioned in our last planning update we needed to have our usual quarterly review but we also needed to finalise our overall plan for the year. It was a really tough day. Whittling down the huge laundry list of things we […]

Posted in Planning | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment