From the workshop: OpenAustralia Labs

What do you do in your spare time during a busy, week-long conference?

A) Relax
B) Have a beer
C) Set up new OpenAustralia sites

If you’re one of our volunteers, Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell or your author, Henare Degan, you answered ‘C’ – well, OK, and a bit of ‘B’ too : )

During last weeks linux.conf.au 2010, held in Wellington, New Zealand, Tim and Henare setup a new site called OpenAustralia Labs.

Labs is a place to showcase some of our more crazy experiments, or just things that aren’t quite ready for prime-time.

We have two experiments already posted to labs with more coming soon:

Register of Interests Transcriber

The Register of Interests Transcriber is Tim’s tool for turning the scanned register we opened up about a year ago into searchable passages of text. It’s been looking for a home since Tim created it a few months ago.

This is a tool we’d really like to see emerge from the labs and appear on the live OpenAustralia.org site so if you think you could help make it more polished, please check out the code and start discussing it on our Community mailing list.

Words in Parliament

This is an interesting little experiment created by Stephen Bartlett during our Melbourne hackfest. It grabs the most recent house debate and analyses the most frequently spoken words in that debate.

If you have any experiments you’d like to try out and demonstrate on OpenAustralia Labs, please don’t hesitate to discuss it on our community mailing list or create a ticket against the new Labs component on our issue tracker.