Author Archives: Luke Bacon

Introduction to Web Scraping Workshop in Sydney

Web scraping is a flexible and powerful technique to collect data for your projects. You can use a scraper to quickly grab all kinds of information for analysis and processing. Scrapers are the backbone of our projects such as They Vote For You and PlanningAlerts— we’re always finding new ways that scrapers can help. There’s […]

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Another 2 million people can get PlanningAlerts

Another 2 million people in Australia now have a simple way to impact development in their local area. Last month the OpenAustralia Foundation teamed up with a group of volunteer engineers from Google and have expanded the availability of our project PlanningAlerts to 21 more local council areas. The event was part of the GoogleServe […]

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A little scraping goes a long way

Last night, about 10 of us got together in Sydney for a fun night of scraping and learning about morph.io. I organised the get together because I’m just really excited about writing scrapers and using data from morph.io at the moment. I’ve only been writing scrapers for the last few months as Matthew and I […]

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Civic Tech Monthly, May 2015

Welcome to the fourth edition of Civic Tech Monthly. Below you’ll find news and notes about civic tech from Australia and around the world. As always we’d love to see you at the OpenAustralia Foundation Sydney Pub Meet next Tuesday if you’re in town. If you’d like to help us out by passing this on, […]

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Civic Tech Monthly, April 2015

Welcome to the third edition of Civic Tech Monthly. Below you’ll find news and notes about civic tech from Australia and around the world. Now that we’re three ports into this voyage we’d love to know what you think. If you’ve got ideas or feedback please leave a comment. You can also contribute and comment […]

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The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference 2015

In late March I was lucky enough to be in London attending The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference 2015. mySociety organised this first international conference on research and civic tech and they kindly shipped me over to take part. I had a great time. I’ve returned with heaps of questions and ideas that need more […]

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A better Right To Know on your phone

One in four people who visit Right To Know use a mobile device to do so. Unfortunately the site hasn’t been designed for them. They’ve been forced to zoom in on the page designed for desktop users. This made it hard to navigate, quickly understand what a page is about, and request information. When traffic […]

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Civic Tech Monthly, February 2015

Welcome to the first edition of Civic Tech Monthly breaks champagne bottle. Today we set sail around the world of civic tech, its peoples and their projects. Civic tech at the moment can mean ‘tech that’s all about citizens exerting and obtaining power’, as well as ‘tech that’s all about improving government services’. We’re following […]

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Unlocking Australia’s public data: A catch up with Rosie Williams

Rosie Williams has independently made a huge contributions to budget transparency and the accessibility of public data in Australia through her project InfoAus. It’s been a while since we were able to catch up at the last pub meet so I sent through a few questions.   What are you working on at the moment? and what was the […]

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Getting to know you

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been reviewing and trying to improve the way the OpenAustralia Foundation handles donations. While there are tens of thousands of people using our projects, over the past few years we’ve only received a very small amount of funding from small donations by individuals. We know that many people […]

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