Category Archives: Projects

Show your support for FOI laws today!

By Kat Szuminska | Published: November 26, 2014

  Today you have an opportunity to support effective Freedom of Information (FOI) laws in Australia. If you support strong FOI legislation then you really can do something to help, and you have to do it today! Tomorrow the Senate will be voting on a Bill which we at the OpenAustralia Foundation believe will undermine […]

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Submission for the “Inquiry into the Freedom of Information Amendment (New Arrangements) Bill 2014”

By Kat Szuminska | Published: November 18, 2014

    The Secretary of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee recently invited The OpenAustralia Foundation to make a submission on their Inquiry into the Freedom of Information Amendment (New Arrangements). These amendments make it harder and more expensive to argue the case if and when agencies refuse requests for information under FOI law. This makes […]

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They Vote For You

By Matthew Landauer | Published: October 21, 2014

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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Time for another hackfest – Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) edition

By Henare Degan | Published: August 13, 2014
A photo from a previous OpenAustralia Hackfest

The OpenAustralia Foundation is pleased to invite you to another one of our legendary hackfests. In some of our previous hackfests we’ve opened PlanningAlerts to over 1.8 million more Australians and brought hacks and hackers together to launch our Freedom of Information project Right To Know. Places are limited so RSVP for free now or […]

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Parliamentary vote tracker project: A Case Study – Asylum Seeker Policy

By Mackay Ash | Published: April 28, 2014

This post is part of a series on our parliamentary vote tracker project. Read our previous post to learn more about the concept of policies and policy selection. You can also read our previous posts: a technical update and an introduction to what we’re doing and why. Co-authored by Natasha Burrows. Specific wordings of policies have been […]

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Parliamentary vote tracker project: The concept of policies and policy selection

By Natasha Burrows | Published: April 11, 2014

This post is part of a series on our parliamentary vote tracker project. You can also read our previous posts: a technical update and an introduction to what we’re doing and why. Advice from Richard Taylor has been a great anchor throughout the process of developing policies. This is that: The first priority when creating […]

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Parliamentary vote tracker project: what we are doing and why

By Natasha Burrows | Published: March 31, 2014
Chamber Red and Notice Paper

Hello! Welcome to a series of posts about the OpenAustralia Foundation’s new conception, a parliamentary vote tracker. This project is based on the Public Whip, a site developed in the UK by Julian Todd and Francis Irving. The point of this project is to make the processes and procedures of parliament more accessible to the […]

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A long overdue tech update about Australia’s first ever parliamentary vote tracker

By Henare Degan | Published: March 23, 2014
Photo of working on the project

Back in July last year Matthew told you that we’d started work on a new project and it’s high time for an update on the progress of that project. I want to share with you what we’ve been doing, where we’re at right now, and some exciting new development that we’re undertaking before we launch […]

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Morph: Announcing A New Scraping Platform

By Matthew Landauer | Published: February 27, 2014

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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Easier collaboration for OpenAustralia Foundation projects

By Henare Degan | Published: December 31, 2013

It should be simple for anyone to get involved in helping create an OpenAustralia Foundation project. After all, that’s what our projects seek to do to our democracy – make it really easy to get involved. Today we’ve made a solid step in that direction. We’ve moved our entire issue tracking system to GitHub Issues. […]

Also posted in Development, ElectionLeaflets.org.au, OpenAustralia Foundation, OpenAustralia.org, PlanningAlerts.org.au, RightToKnow.org.au | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment