Author Archives: Matthew Landauer

Not very secret meeting about parliamentary openness in London

Not secret at all… Just a really quick one to let you all know. I’ve been invited to attend, representing the OpenAustralia Foundation, a study group meeting of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and Commonwealth representatives of the OpeningParliament.org community. This will be taking place next week in London, UK. The aim of the study group […]

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What’s the latest with RightToKnow?

Right To Know was launched at the end of last year and through the quietest part of the year when people are enjoying the fine weather and some well-earned free time people have already put in over fifty freedom of information requests. That’s pretty amazing. Requests have been diverse, including for information about thing like: […]

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Federal Senate congratulates the OpenAustralia Foundation for its ‘Right to Know’ initiative

Earlier today a motion was presented to the Senate which notes the creation of the Freedom of Information request site Right To Know we launched yesterday and which urges the government to, “use the site, provide feedback, and support the Foundation in its aim of encouraging effective citizen access to government information.” We are very […]

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Why we think that Freedom of Information should be easy

In the lead up to the launch of Right To Know, we organised an all weekend Hack[s]fest event for which we asked journalists, activists and software developers interested in Freedom of Information to come along and work together for the final push. As if writing software and making freedom of information requests wasn’t enough, volunteer […]

Posted in RightToKnow.org.au | 1 Response

You have the Right To Know

Whether you are an octogenarian human rights activist, a working mother, a twenty something surfer or still at school, the government undoubtedly has information that is useful to you and many people like you who share your interests. But am I allowed to access it? Yes! 30 years ago Australia enacted a law which changed […]

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Seeds of Parliamentary support to bring NSW Hansard on to OpenAustralia.org

Since we started OpenAustralia we’ve wanted to republish not only the Federal but also State and Territory Parliaments on Openaustralia.org. Bizarrely (to us) its been much harder to get the States on board with this than our own Federal Government; while there remain challenges ahead we’re quietly confident. It’s the twenty first century after all, […]

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Accelerating to the future of online democracy in Australia

The OpenAustralia Foundation has achieved some remarkable things in the few short years that it’s been going. We’ve built some great projects that have shown Australia that democracy and the internet can be very good and positive bed-fellows, done a bit to help push governments in the right direction and most importantly of all, helped […]

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A Proposal to the Taskforce

Update: See the end for an update Around September 2009 as the Government 2.0 Taskforce was coming towards the end of its term a few months later, Nicholas Gruen, the chair of the Taskforce, let us know that they were likely to have a significant amount of money left unspent at the end of their […]

Posted in OpenAustralia Foundation | Tagged , , | 2 Responses

What’s new with PlanningAlerts, part 2

In part one, we covered some of the new features that we’ve added in the last couple of months. Next, we’ll cover the myriad of improvements, some small, some large, that we’ve made to existing features. Most of these, as a normal person using the site, individually you might never notice the difference. Small aesthetic […]

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What’s new with PlanningAlerts, part 1

The last couple of months have seen a mammoth development effort on PlanningAlerts. Throughout that time we’ve posted regular updates on the PlanningAlerts Twitter feed. Follow us there if you’re interested in the absolute latest and greatest. The purpose of this post is to bring together and summarise those changes, to make it easier to […]

Posted in Development, PlanningAlerts.org.au | 2 Responses