Author Archives: Matthew Landauer

We’ve had a top bunch of people road-testing OpenAustralia on its path to being born into the scary wide world. You’ve found some bugs, we’ve fixed ’em and we’ve added a few new features in to the mix. Come join the fun, be one of the first people to see OpenAustralia and in the process […]

Just a quick update of where we’re at with building the OpenAustralia website – we’ve been working really hard in our spare time to get some very important features on the website working.Some of the big things that we got working this month: Search – you can search for text in speeches, see the number […]

The Hansard, the official parliamentary record, which we are using to generate the content of our web application is copyrighted. This means that we can not republish it (i.e. launch the site) until we have obtained permission. At the beginning of January we contacted the Commonwealth Copyright Administration to gain permission to republish not only […]

We were recently contacted by GetUp who heard through the grape vine what we are doing. Last week we went for a meeting with a few people from Getup, in their offices above a pub in the Sydney CBD. We showed them what we were doing, our plans and the current progress of the development […]

We’ve recently moved over to using Mercurial for our source code version control. It has the advantage over subversion of being a distributed version control system. This of course fits in nicely with the democratic aims of openaustralia. We’ve also added a bug tracking database, Trac. For more information visit http://trac-hg.assembla.com/openaustralia

Like theyworkforyou.com we are going to do all our software development out in the open including open sourcing any and all bits of code to do with this project. The people who set up the truly excellent UK theyworkforyou set an excellent example by open sourcing the code that ran their site. We are planning […]

All I’ve done so far is take the website code from the UK website theyworkforyou.com as is and write a very crude parser for the Australian Hansard which takes that data and rejigs into an XML format that can be imported into the website database.There are a huge number of problems and I have committed […]