Melbourne’s first OpenAustralia hackfest

OpenAustralia.org, Australia’s first eDemocracy website, would like to invite its friends, fans and volunteers to its first Melbourne hackfest.

The first OpenAustralia hackfest, held in Sydney in June, was a big success, attracting 50 volunteers. We worked on solving existing problems as well as starting new OpenAustralia projects including a mobile version of OpenAustralia.

We’re happy to announce that several of the founders of OpenAustralia will be making the trip to Melbourne so you can talk to them about the project, put forward your own ideas, and get to work right away!

If you’re a software hacker, you can dive in and work on bugs, pick an item from the wishlist and start creating a new feature, or work on just about anything you’d like to to improve or extend OpenAustralia. The sky’s the limit!

If you’re a fan or user of OpenAustralia and you’re not technically minded, fear not! Websites don’t get better without people USING them and TESTING them to give us ideas on how to improve! If you’re a journalist or someone who really loves statistics and databases, help us by coming up with crazy searches that push the limits of what OpenAustralia can do!

ThoughtWorks is kindly hosting the hackfest, which kicks off at 12 noon and will go until 5pm. Please note you’ll need to bring your own laptop. A ThoughtWorks volunteer will meet hackfest attendees at 12 sharp to let them in the building, so please be on time.

Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you think might be interested – but note that due to the size of the room, we won’t be able to accept more than 30 people for this event.

RSVP by Wednesday, 23 September please, so we can arrange nametags.

We look forward to working with you to make our democracy a little more open!

From the OpenAustralia team.