Digital Library Services for Democracy

As you may know, the Register of Members’ Interests says who or what organisations are paying what to members of the House of Representatives. This is a really important document that explains who is financially influencing your Representatives.

For this reason, we obviously want to include this information in OpenAustralia.

This is what happened when we tried to track it down:

From: kat
Sent: Tuesday, 20 May 2008 5:51 PM
To: Wright, Bernard (REPS); Elder, David (REPS)
Cc: Matthew Landauer
Subject: Register of Members’ Interests online location?

Hi 
I’m looking to find the Register of Members’ Interests  online.  My initial searches have come up blank.  Please can you let me know if this information is currently available and where I might access it?
Can you then also confirm if the information constitutes part of the Parliamentary Hansard?
Many thanks, Kat Szuminska
—
http://www.openaustralia.org

From: “Wright, Bernard (REPS)”

Date: 21 May 2008 9:20:37 AM

To: “kat”

Cc: “Brennan, Laraine (REPS)”, “Elder, David (REPS)”

Subject: RE: Register of Members’ Interests online location?

Dear Kat

The register is not available on line. It consiste of a set of binders with hard copies of declarations of interests made by members, and is updated on a continual basis as members notify alterations to their interests. The full register is kept in Parliament House, and is available for inspection – tel 62774224.

It is not clear where you live – – if you are away from Canberra and would like to have alook at the sort of declarations made we would be happy to send you a sample volume.

This material should not be thought of as part of the Hansard record.

Yours sincerely

Bernard Wright

Does something about this remind you of a scene from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy?

Yesterday we had a meeting at the ABC about their forthcoming show, Q&A – “Adventures in Democracy”. It brings a live studio audience together with politicians and gives ordinary people the opportunity to ask questions directly to their representatives. It sounds dry, but it definitely isn’t!

The first show is next Thursday (22nd May) at 9:30pm on ABC1 and streaming on the web.

They’re also developing a companion website and that’s where we find common ground between the aims of OpenAustralia and Q&A.

They showed us what they were doing and we showed them what we were doing. It turns out that part of their site allows users to enter their postcode which then tells them their representative. They can then find out things about their representative, their constituency, etc.. as well as enabling the sending questions through for the programme’s guests on the night.

We had a great discussion and it quickly became apparent how complementary what OpenAustralia and the Q&A folks are doing.

So, we talked about ways that they could use content from OpenAustralia on their website and how we could direct people at the ABC Q&A website.

This is all going to take a while to come to fruition. The ABC is a big organisation, that justifiably has very strict editorial policies about how they link to other websites. They want to be sure, for instance, that we’re not secretly backed by some political party (we’re definitely not!). It’s also very important that if we link to the ABC Q&A site that it is similarly impartial and perceived as such.

We’re just a few motivated people who have sacrificed a lot of our own time to build a totally non-partisan site that will inform. We believe that, whatever your political ideas, being better informed in a totally impartial way helps make the world more engaging, accountable and ultimately, more fun.

We’ve had a top bunch of people road-testing OpenAustralia on its path to being born into the scary wide world.

You’ve found some bugs, we’ve fixed ’em and we’ve added a few new features in to the mix.

Come join the fun, be one of the first people to see OpenAustralia and in the process help us to make this thing so good it can’t possibly be ignored.

Just a quick update of where we’re at with building the OpenAustralia website – we’ve been working really hard in our spare time to get some very important features on the website working.Some of the big things that we got working this month:

• Search – you can search for text in speeches, see the number of times different representatives used a particular phrase and see the most recent speeches by a particular representative. These are just some of the things you can do with the search feature.
• Ministerial information – we’ve added all the ministerial positions of representatives and senators back to the beginning of the Howard government. When a minister speaks, their their job title is right next to their photo. Also, on each representative’s page you see all their ministerial appointments, current and past.
• Postcode lookup – On the front page you can enter your postcode and it will tell you who your representative is and remember that for the next time you come back to the site.

There have also been lots of little fixes. If you want to follow the software development in detail go to software.openaustralia.org.

Hurrah, an official response from the Department of Parliamentary Services on our request to republish the Hansard.

“You don’t require permission to reproduce Hansard extracts and from your recent email […] additionally I can confirm that your citing of the Hansard source is appropriate.”

One small step for OpenAustralia, and one not insubstantial leap for democratic transparency in Australia.

To everyone involved getting us this far, thank you! We have your words, and now we are going after your pictures.

The Hansard, the official parliamentary record, which we are using to generate the content of our web application is copyrighted. This means that we can not republish it (i.e. launch the site) until we have obtained permission.

At the beginning of January we contacted the Commonwealth Copyright Administration to gain permission to republish not only the Hansard but the entire contents of www.aph.gov.au, the Parliament of Australia’s website.

After a process of being directed to several different departments we recently were informed that our request is now being seriously considered by all three Parliamentary departments that support the working of Parliament, the Department of the Senate, the Department of the House of Representatives and the Department of Parliamentary Services.

The topic of discussion at this stage is focused on how each government department’s information is cited which is completely reasonable. Also, in every speech that is shown in our application there is a link that goes directly to the original Hansard source on the Parliament of Australia website.

With a bit of luck we should obtain permission soon.

We were recently contacted by GetUp who heard through the grape vine what we are doing. Last week we went for a meeting with a few people from Getup, in their offices above a pub in the Sydney CBD. We showed them what we were doing, our plans and the current progress of the development of the site.

We want OpenAustralia to be useful to political organisations, whatever their interests or persuasions, as well as being useful to individuals who want to know a little more about what their representatives are doing in parliament.