Right To Know was launched at the end of last year and through the quietest part of the year when people are enjoying the fine weather and some well-earned free time people have already put in over fifty freedom of information requests. That’s pretty amazing. Requests have been diverse, including for information about thing like: […]
Earlier today a motion was presented to the Senate which notes the creation of the Freedom of Information request site Right To Know we launched yesterday and which urges the government to, “use the site, provide feedback, and support the Foundation in its aim of encouraging effective citizen access to government information.” We are very […]
In the lead up to the launch of Right To Know, we organised an all weekend Hack[s]fest event for which we asked journalists, activists and software developers interested in Freedom of Information to come along and work together for the final push. As if writing software and making freedom of information requests wasn’t enough, volunteer […]
Whether you are an octogenarian human rights activist, a working mother, a twenty something surfer or still at school, the government undoubtedly has information that is useful to you and many people like you who share your interests. But am I allowed to access it? Yes! 30 years ago Australia enacted a law which changed […]
Since we started OpenAustralia we’ve wanted to republish not only the Federal but also State and Territory Parliaments on Openaustralia.org. Bizarrely (to us) its been much harder to get the States on board with this than our own Federal Government; while there remain challenges ahead we’re quietly confident. It’s the twenty first century after all, […]
The OpenAustralia Foundation has achieved some remarkable things in the few short years that it’s been going. We’ve built some great projects that have shown Australia that democracy and the internet can be very good and positive bed-fellows, done a bit to help push governments in the right direction and most importantly of all, helped […]
Update: See the end for an update Around September 2009 as the Government 2.0 Taskforce was coming towards the end of its term a few months later, Nicholas Gruen, the chair of the Taskforce, let us know that they were likely to have a significant amount of money left unspent at the end of their […]
In part one, we covered some of the new features that we’ve added in the last couple of months. Next, we’ll cover the myriad of improvements, some small, some large, that we’ve made to existing features. Most of these, as a normal person using the site, individually you might never notice the difference. Small aesthetic […]
The last couple of months have seen a mammoth development effort on PlanningAlerts. Throughout that time we’ve posted regular updates on the PlanningAlerts Twitter feed. Follow us there if you’re interested in the absolute latest and greatest. The purpose of this post is to bring together and summarise those changes, to make it easier to […]
I just finished watching Hans Rosling’s documentary for the BBC “The Joy of Stats”. Hans Rosling is the ebullient swedish professor who came to widespread public recognition through his passionate TED talks where he used statistics to unravel and debunk many widespread myths and misunderstandings about world health and the third world. The documentary “The Joy […]
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