Category Archives: Projects

Introducing the biggest Planning Alerts redesign in fourteen years

We originally launched Planning Alerts in October 2009. That feels like a lifetime ago. In that time all sorts of features have been added, there have been visual redesigns, and we’ve introduced many little improvements and fixes. Yet nothing we have done before feels as substantial and meaningful as what we’re launching today.  On the […]

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They Vote For You – There’s something wrong with Peter Dutton’s voting record!

You may have seen this screenshot showing Opposition Leader Peter Dutton as a supporter of a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice in parliament. If this looks wrong to you, it’s because it is. Several votes on the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice) 2023 were erroneously connected to this policy, when they were […]

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Journey to Improving Planning Alerts: A Service Designer’s Perspective – Part 3 Toolkit for Service Improvement

Guest post by Service Designer and Researcher, Sabina Popin This blog post is the grand finale in our three-part series on the recent Planning Alerts Service Improvement project. I kicked off the series with a bird’s eye view of the project, and the sequel dove deeper into the approach, research, insights, opportunities, and concepts. Now, […]

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Journey to Improving Planning Alerts: A Service Designer’s Perspective – Part 2 Research, Testing and Insights

Guest post by Service Designer and Researcher, Sabina Popin This post is part of a three part series about the recent project on Planning Alerts Service Improvement. In the previous post I outlined the entirety of the project in brief. In this post you get to read in more depth about the epic journey we’ve […]

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Journey to Improving Planning Alerts: A Service Designer’s Perspective

Guest post by Service Designer and Researcher, Sabina Popin Welcome to the journey of improving Planning Alerts! The OpenAustralia Foundation is a tiny organisation that gets a lot of email! Thousands of emails a year are directly in relation to the Planning Alerts service, people who use the service reaching out asking for all kinds […]

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They Vote For You: The rebels of 2023 (so far)

Back in 2016, I wrote a post about the state of rebellion in our parliament. At that time, rebellions were quite rare. How things have changed! We now have several rebels in parliament, mostly from the Liberal Party. What does it mean to be a rebel? A rebel voter is someone who crosses the floor […]

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New! Three easy steps to a better PlanningAlerts

Do you use PlanningAlerts and have an email alert set up? Do you realise you’ve never set a password for an account? Have you ever found unsubscribing from an alert not entirely obvious or needed help to confirm a comment or update your email address for an alert? Good news! From now on you’ll be […]

Also posted in Announcement, Development, PlanningAlerts.org.au | 12 Responses

What are people contacting PlanningAlerts about?

Guest post by Service Designer and Researcher, Joanna Hill Since first launching, PlanningAlerts has grown a lot. The number of people writing to PlanningAlerts has crept up and up, as of February 2011 sending out just over 900,000 alerts (thanks Wayback Machine). By the time of writing (Dec 1 2022) PlanningAlerts has sent out a […]

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Senator for NSW Andrew Bragg threatens OpenAustralia Foundation with legal action

Liberal Party Senator Andrew Bragg has stepped up his campaign against the OpenAustralia Foundation. The senator has hired high profile lawyer Rebekah Giles to threaten legal action over how the OpenAustralia Foundation website They Vote For You presents his parliamentary voting record.  They Vote For You takes the official voting record from Hansard and presents […]

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A new category has been added to your representative’s voting records!

You may have noticed that your MP and senator voting records are looking a bit different.  Voting records are now divided into nine different categories: Voted consistently for Voted almost always for Voted generally for Voted a mixture of for and against Voted generally against Voted almost always against Voted consistently against We can’t say […]

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