Category Archives: PlanningAlerts.org.au

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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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 […]

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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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Putting Councillors to Bed in PlanningAlerts

This week we’re removing councillors, and the ability to write to councillors from PlanningAlerts. We disabled the feature in 2019. Now we’re removing the functionality from the code that runs the site and as a side-effect historical comments to councillors made between 2016 and 2019 will now no longer be visible on PlanningAlerts. Why on […]

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The story of a tiny, almost invisible change

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My Outreachy Internship with Open Australia Foundation

Cross-posted from Hisayo Horie’s blog, our wonderful Outreachy intern for the last 3 months. Officially I finished my internship with Open Australia Foundation, and I already miss working with OAF so much. I learned so much about programing and development, as well as community centred technology, challenges, and most importantly where I stand and where […]

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Our plan for PlanningAlerts

Today we’re excited to welcome Hisayo Horie to our team. Over the next 3 months they will be working with us to make updating councillor data for Ask Your Local Councillors a breeze. This will breath new life into this important part of PlanningAlerts and will give thousands and thousands more people the opportunity to […]

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Our first ever Outreachy Internship

Today we’re excited to announce that Hisayo Horie will be working with us for the next 3 months in our Outreachy Internship position. Before we introduce Hisayo, and the project we’ll be working on together, let us tell you a little about how the Outreachy application process has gone since our announcement blog post just […]

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