OpenAustralia Foundation is running out of money. Unless more of the people who use our library start supporting it every month, we will have no choice but to begin an orderly wind-down of Planning Alerts, Right to Know, They Vote for You and OpenAustralia.org.au. While we can’t say exactly when this will happen, we are talking months rather than years.
I’m Ben, the CEO. I have been part of the foundation for over a decade, first as a volunteer and now on staff. For most of that time I was the volunteer administrator of Right to Know, and for long stretches the only one: keeping it running, answering the emails, and when an agency wrongly refused people’s requests, taking the complaint to the Information Commissioner myself. I believe deeply in what we do, and I know what this library means to the people who use it. I want to tell you what’s going on now, rather than have to write a farewell letter in a few months.
In short: donations have fallen, some of the larger organisations that paid us for data have gone, and keeping everything running is costing us more than ever. Together, this has created a perfect storm.
What is OpenAustralia Foundation?
For those who don’t know us, OpenAustralia Foundation is a charity that runs a free, public online library of what Australian governments do. It is made up of four unique collections you use – likely without knowing they are connected:
- Planning Alerts tells you what is proposed for your street, and sends your comment straight to the council.
- They Vote for You shows how your federal representatives actually voted, on every division, in plain language.
- Right to Know lets anyone make a Freedom of Information request, and keeps every request and response public so the next person doesn’t have to ask twice.
- OpenAustralia.org.au makes the complete record of what is said in Parliament searchable.
Everything in the library is free. Everything in it is built on open source code. And we are strictly non-partisan: we don’t tell you what to think about a development, a vote or a document. We make sure you can find it, and help you effect the change you want to see in your community.
We are relied upon by journalists, content creators, councils, advocates, businesses, government and everyday people. A regulator recently used our collection to check whether government agencies were publishing what they are required to publish. Mostly, though, it is used by people who just want to know what is going on, and who have every right to.
What stops if we stop
If we are forced to close, the alerts stop. More than 142,000 active Planning Alerts subscriptions go quiet. More than 14,400 Freedom of Information requests and their responses on Right to Know, the voting record of every federal representative on They Vote for You, and more than 936,000 entries of Hansard on OpenAustralia.org.au lose the home that keeps them free and searchable. The software that gathers all of it from government websites every day stops running.
Why monthly, and why now
A large one-off gift helps enormously, and we welcome every one. What keeps a library like this open year after year is steady, predictable income so that our small team can keep collecting new information from hundreds of government websites every day, answer your questions, fix what breaks, and get on with the things we have wanted to build for years. We are not short of plans. We are short of the steady income that lets a small team carry them out. That is what monthly supporters give us: the difference between building something and scrambling from one month to the next.
So, I’m asking you for one thing today: become a monthly supporter at $20 (or more) a month. $20 a month is about the cost of a coffee a week, and right now it is the single most useful thing anyone can do for this library.
If you already give monthly, thank you. You are the reason we are still here to write this. If you can increase your gift, that helps more than you might think. And if a one-off gift is what you can do, large or small, it is just as welcome.
If you can’t give, you can still help. Share this with one person who uses any of the collections. Tell your local paper, your council, your union, your community group. Most people who rely on this library have no idea it is run by a charity.
A brief note on tax
While we are a charity registered with the ACNC, at this time, donations are not tax deductible. We are actively working to change that, but we don’t know how long that will take.
What happens next
We will tell you how this goes, honestly, either way. This library has been open since 2007. Whether it is still open next year is now, quite literally, up to the people who use it.
Thank you.
Ben Fairless
Chief Executive Officer, OpenAustralia Foundation