Category Archives: Projects

Bums on seats: how often is your representative present in Parliament?

By Mackay Ash | Published: October 14, 2016

Attendance levels in Parliament vary a lot. With the 45th Parliament just a few weeks in, our parliamentary vote tracking website They Vote For You is currently listing some federal politicians with 100% attendance and some with as low as 38% attendance. But what do these figures actually tell us and how accurate are they? […]

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Happy Right To Know Day – you have the Right To Know, now right across Australia

By Henare Degan | Published: September 28, 2016

Is it safe for your children to swim in the river? How much did your council spend on that fancy new mobile app? Will we be building better public transport? How much graffiti is being reported in your area? What really happened to those stranded whales you heard about? Australia’s state and local governments create […]

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OpenAustralia Foundation responds for your Right To Know

By Kat Szuminska | Published: August 30, 2016

Today the ABC reports “Tax Office imposes blanket ban on FOI requests via Right To Know website”. In the article the OpenAustralia Foundation’s response provides the context of the Australian Tax Office’s (ATO) refusal to process valid FOI requests made through the Right To Know. We hope to see the ATO continue to process your requests, as they […]

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They Vote For You – Why isn’t there a policy on that?

By Mackay Ash | Published: July 28, 2016

Firstly, thank you for visiting They Vote For You! We currently have over a hundred policies that you can use to explore how your representatives vote on particular issues. But what if something’s missing that you really care about? And why isn’t it there already? Here are three possible reasons why we may not have […]

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They Vote For You – What new policies would you like to see?

By Mackay Ash | Published: July 14, 2016

They Vote For You now has over one hundred policies to help us keep track of how our representatives are voting on our behalf! They range from whether to have a Royal Commission into banking to whether to legalise same-sex marriage, and you can find them all on your representative’s voting record. For example, here’s […]

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Adding your local councillors to PlanningAlerts

By Henare Degan | Published: July 13, 2016

You may have heard that you can now use PlanningAlerts to discuss development applications with your local councillors. With over 5,000 councillors in Australia just gathering the data is a big job. We’ve already done that for about half the councils we currently cover but we need your help to collect the rest. How to […]

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Matthew’s back: Improving the stability and scalability of the morph.io platform

By Matthew Landauer | Published: July 7, 2016

I’m very happy to be back at the Foundation for a little stint now to get my hands dirty on some coding, something I haven’t had any opportunity to do over the last year. It’s funny how you can miss these things! As you might have noticed, I’ve been away from working on morph.io and […]

Also posted in Announcement, Development, Morph | 1 Response

Ask Your Local Councillors

By Luke Bacon | Published: June 21, 2016

PlanningAlerts makes it easy to impact what happens to your local buildings, parks, streets, and infrastructure. Over the last 7 years almost 40,000 people have signed up for alerts and thousands of you have made official comments on development applications for everyone to see. But there are more ways to impact what gets built and […]

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Picking a focus for the final push on our current major project

By Luke Bacon | Published: June 13, 2016

A couple of weeks ago Kat and I spent some time working out how best to spend the remaining time on our latest major project: helping people impact local planning by making it easy for them to write to their local councillors through PlanningAlerts. I thought it would be useful for our team, and anyone […]

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Prototyping better development notices at the OpenAustralia Hackfest

By Jordan Hatch | Published: May 25, 2016

Last month, the OpenAustralia Foundation ran a Hackfest, at the end of their two week-long residency at Frontyard in Marrickville. On the day, a group of us decided to take a look at the notices posted at properties with proposed development applications. You’ll have seen them before: they’re often bright green, tied to fences, and […]

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