Author Archives: Henare Degan

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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Making your emails faster and more secure

Last week we made a couple of changes that make your PlanningAlerts emails more responsive and a bit more secure. They’re great examples of the kind of improvements we’d usually struggle to find to the time for, were it not for our maintenance-focussed start to the year. When you sign up for an alert or […]

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We maintain things for people

About a month ago we had our major planning session for 2017. The idea is to get everyone together for a few days, share and discuss project ideas, and ultimately come up with a plan for what OpenAustralia Foundation should work on over the whole year. We’ve done quite a few of these sessions now […]

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Right to Know, the ATO, independence and transparency

Since August 2016, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has been refusing to process the valid Freedom of Information requests they receive from people using Right To Know. At least two of the people who have had their requests blocked have lodged complaints to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). One of them is […]

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How to send your Freedom of Information request to many authorities at once

Right To Know makes it simple for you to request information from any public authority in Australia. Sometimes you might want to ask the same question but to lots of different public authorities at once. Right To Know can help you there too, with batch requests. Batch requests let you write one request that gets […]

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The year is almost over – here’s our plan for the rest of 2016

While our trip to Cockatoo Island a year ago seems like it was an age away, this year feels like it has sped by. We’ve already launched two major projects in 2016 – something I don’t think we’ve ever done before. No wonder it feels like we’ve been busy. We had our final quarterly planning […]

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Happy Right To Know Day – you have the Right To Know, now right across Australia

Is it safe for your children to swim in the river? How much did your council spend on that fancy new mobile app? Will we be building better public transport? How much graffiti is being reported in your area? What really happened to those stranded whales you heard about? Australia’s state and local governments create […]

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Adding your local councillors to PlanningAlerts

You may have heard that you can now use PlanningAlerts to discuss development applications with your local councillors. With over 5,000 councillors in Australia just gathering the data is a big job. We’ve already done that for about half the councils we currently cover but we need your help to collect the rest. How to […]

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Setting sail for the second half of 2016

A couple of weeks ago we had our third planning session for 2016. These quarterly planning sessions allow us to reflect on the work we’ve been doing and make any adjustments we need during the year. This post is a little update on what we discussed and what we’ll be working on from July through […]

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What we’ve got planned for 2016

A few weeks ago we had our second planning session of 2016. As we mentioned in our last planning update we needed to have our usual quarterly review but we also needed to finalise our overall plan for the year. It was a really tough day. Whittling down the huge laundry list of things we […]

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