Category Archives: Projects

They Vote For You – Finding the real facts about voting

By Mackay Ash | Published: February 4, 2016

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer. – Abraham Lincoln When the Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Bill 2015 went through the House of Representatives, it passed […]

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They Vote For You – Join our summer working bee!

By Mackay Ash | Published: November 13, 2015

Calling all law students and political science enthusiasts! This summer, the OpenAustralia Foundation invites you to put your statutory interpretation skills to work! If you can pick through the Parliamentary jargon and make it clear who’s voting for what from a day’s proceedings then you can help. They Vote For You launched last year to […]

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They Vote For You – There’s something wrong with Andrew Wilkie’s voting record!

By Mackay Ash | Published: November 5, 2015

Since it launched last year, we’ve received a few emails from the offices of Members or Senators that ask us to change their voting record on They Vote For You in some way because they think it’s inaccurate. But when we ask them to tell us what the error is, we don’t hear back from […]

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Ruby web scraping tutorial on morph.io – Part 5, saving your data & running it on morph.io

By Luke Bacon | Published: October 22, 2015

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials. In the last post we dealt with the site’s pagination and started scraping […]

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Ruby web scraping tutorial on morph.io – Part 4, dealing with pagination

By Luke Bacon | Published: October 21, 2015

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials. In the last post we finished collecting the data we want but discovered […]

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Ruby web scraping tutorial on morph.io – Part 3, continue writing your scraper

By Luke Bacon | Published: October 20, 2015

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials. In the last post we started writing our scraper and gathering some data. […]

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Who comments in PlanningAlerts and how could it work better?

By Luke Bacon | Published: October 20, 2015

In our last two quarterly planning posts (see Q3 2015 and Q4 2015), we’ve talked about helping people write to their elected local councillors about planning applications through PlanningAlerts. As Matthew wrote in June, “The aim is to strengthen the connection between citizens and local councillors around one of the most important things that local […]

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Ruby web scraping tutorial on morph.io – Part 2, start writing your scraper

By Luke Bacon | Published: October 15, 2015

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials. In the past post we set up our scraper. Now we’re going to […]

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Ruby web scraping tutorial on morph.io – Part 1, setting up your scraper

By Luke Bacon | Published: October 13, 2015

This post is part of a series of posts that provide step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple web scraper using Ruby on morph.io. If you find any problems, let us know in the comments so we can improve these tutorials.   With just a few lines of code, you can write a scraper […]

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A massive week for They Vote For You

By Luke Bacon | Published: September 24, 2015

Forget what politicians say. What truly matters is what they do. And what they do is vote, to write our laws which affect us all. — They Vote For You Australia got a new Prime Minister last week. As the media detailed the step by step drama, tens of thousands of people visited and shared […]

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