Author Archives: Matthew Landauer

Civic Tech Monthly, March 2015

Welcome to the second edition of Civic Tech Monthly, our selection of what’s new and interesting in the last month of Civic Tech in Australia and around the world. Don’t forget to share this newsletter with friends and colleagues. Forward this email to them or invite them to subscribe at http://oaf.us8.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=86c7f63554037aed044df4556&id=083b3ae43e News & Notes Update […]

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Scraping javascript sites with morph.io

Just a quick post to let you know that it’s now possible to scrape javascript heavy sites easily using our scraping platform morph.io. This is really useful with Microsoft .NET web sites that often use complicated states stored in javascript with links simulated via javascript posts. Also, we recently discovered another more worrying example. The […]

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PlanningAlerts API changes

Starting today, we’re beginning to roll out a change to the way the PlanningAlerts API works. We’re introducing API keys for all users of the API from low-volume non-commercial users to high-volume commercial users. We are making this change so that we can better measure and understand the way people are using the API as […]

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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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They Vote For You

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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Morph: Announcing A New Scraping Platform

Web scrapers could be called the unsung heroes of data liberation. They invisibly power so many websites including real estate search sites, product comparison sites and the ever familiar Google search engine. Scraping is where you run a program to extract structured data from web pages. Web scraping powers PlanningAlerts, which allows you to find […]

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An experiment in visualising preferences

A little over a week ago the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) published the preference tickets for the Federal election. Every party has to lodge with the AEC how they would like their votes to be distributed for people that vote above the line in the Senate. Of course, this is of fascination to political insiders, […]

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This Is Not An Election Leaflet – 2013 Federal Election Edition

This year, like we did during the 2010 Federal Election, we have made an election leaflet which is not an election leaflet. We’ll be sending these out to let people know about ElectionLeaflets.org.au and encourage them to upload the election leaflets they receive in the mail to the site. Every election leaflet uploaded helps make […]

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Did I really vote for that?

At the OpenAustralia Foundation we’ve been working hard to throw some light on the day to day reality of our democracy and help make connecting with our communities; our neighbours, politicians & people who work behind the scenes in the public service just a bit easier. More than 800,000 Australians have used OpenAustralia.org to follow […]

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