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

By Matthew Landauer | Published: October 17, 2012

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, and so the question is not if, but when will we have all levels of government Hansards together in a single searchable site?

Recently, an international initiative by a large number of our fellow Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations, the Declaration of Parliamentary Openness, was announced. This lays out principles which we all hope Parliaments can follow. They are simple principles that make Parliaments more accessible and accountable to the very people that they are representing.

When news of the announcement came, we were rather pleased to see that Penny Sharpe, the NSW Shadow Minister for Transport, made a speech in parliament on the declaration noting it’s relevance here. She appears to have been the first Parliamentarian to have mentioned the declaration in a Parliament anywhere in the world. We love our world firsts!

She then took the next step of writing to Greg Pearce, who’s the Minister for Finance and Services and Don Harwin, the President of the Legislative Council asking directly for their support in helping us make the NSW parliament more accessible to citizens.

I quote the text of the letters here. For the originals see the end [1]

The Hon Penny Sharpe MLC
Shadow Minister for Transport

The Hon. Greg Pearce MLC
Minister for Finance and Services

Dear Minister

I am writing in support of the Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation (PMO) OpenAustralia (www.OpenAustralia.org).

OpenAustralia is a not-for-profit, volunteer based organisation that aims to make it easy for people to keep track of their Federal representatives by providing alerts when any given Member of Parliament speaks.

Currently, OpenAustralia does not have the ability to provide this service to the citizens of NSW on behalf of their representatives because of issues in accessing the Parliament of NSW’s Hansard feed and due to a lack of funding to expand their operations.

I believe the citizens of NSW would benefit from such a service in this state.

OpenAustralia would require a small grant of up to $10,000 to allow expansion of their work.

Given the Government’s state commitment to “making it easier for NSW citizens to interact with government, to harnessing the oppurtunities provided by ICT to improve government operations, and to developing the ICT industry in NSW”, could you investigate if there is funding available to OpenAustralia to assist them to make it easier for NSW citizens to access and interact with the work of their elected representatives?

Yours sincerely

Penny Sharpe MLC

The Hon Penny Sharpe MLC
Shadow Minister for Transport

The Hon. Don Harwin MLC
President of the Legislative Council of NSW

Dear President

I am writing to request your assistance in convening a meeting with the Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation (PMO) OpenAustralia.

PMOs are organisations set up by citizens to monitor or assess the functioning of parliaments or their individual members.

OpenAustralia aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their Federal representatives by providing alerts when any given Member of Parliament speaks.

Currently, OpenAustralia.org does not have the ability to provide this service to the citizens of NSW on behalf of their state representatives because of issues in accessing the Parliament of NSW’s Hansard feed.

The service that OpenAustralia provides is a successful blueprint for engaging citizens with the work of their elected representatives.

I believe the citizens of NSW would benefit from such a service here.

I would be grateful for your assistance in convening a meeting between Dr Matthew Landauer, Director, OpenAustralia Foundation and the Parliamentary Information Services section to see what can be done to enable OpenAustralia to provide their service to citizens of NSW.

For more information about OpenAustralia, please visit www.OpenAustralia.org

Yours sincerely

Penny Sharpe MLC

We thank Penny Sharpe for her support and for writing these letters. We are looking forward to where this goes.

[1] Scans of letters from Penny Sharpe

Posted in OpenAustralia Foundation, OpenAustralia.org | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Responses

Accelerating to the future of online democracy in Australia

By Matthew Landauer | Published: September 25, 2012

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 over one million Australians connect with their Politicians, Governments and Communities through projects like OpenAustralia, PlanningAlerts and Election Leaflets.

It’s been amazing, thrilling and very very satisfying, but having said that, it’s been hard. Really hard.

The sad but difficult reality is that we’ve been struggling to find a way to make this whole enterprise sustainable. What do we mean by that?

Our online democracy projects have been built on the creativity and hard work of our volunteers. Most people dip in, help a little using their specialist (and usually highly-paid) skills to fix something and then dip out when their other commitments and life takes over.

We also have a core group consisting of the founders, Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska and an early volunteer, now board member, Henare Degan, that do around 90-95% of the work. This in itself is not a problem. Nobody is making us do this! However, it has, especially over the last two years become increasingly difficult to put in the large number of unpaid hours that’s required to maintain, nurture and build the OpenAustralia Foundation and its projects so that we continue what we started funded only by our own savings and a burning desire to make a difference.

Early on, a couple of months of the very early prototype development of PlanningAlerts was funded by the Government 2.0 taskforce. Other than that all unpaid.

A couple of months ago we received a surprise email from a supporter we’d never been contacted by before. Guy King wrote a short mail to us to say he was considering donating some money. “Were we still busy?” He asked “What would we do with money?”

This is what we wrote back:

Hi Guy,

Thanks for getting in touch!

The project is still active, though we haven’t built any new projects
in a while and the blog has definitely been neglected. Over the last
year or so we’ve been maintaining and developing the existing
projects. For instance, the scraper for OpenAustralia.org was
rewritten to handle the changes that aph.gov.au made to the way they
store the Hansard data. We ran ElectionLeaflets.org.au for the recent
Queensland election and we’ve steadily been expanding the reach of
PlanningAlerts.org.au by adding new local councils. We’re now covering
129 councils and we’ve sent out over 3.5 million development
applications.

As you’re probably aware, the vast majority of the work on the
projects is done by volunteers.

The biggest barrier to building new projects, which of course we
desperately want to do, is a shortage of funding. We’ve found that the
sustained effort required in getting a new project off the ground and
nurturing it (including building a community around it) is far too big
a commitment for people to undertake unpaid.

Over the last years we’ve tried to obtain funding from numerous
sources. Our major obstacle has been that we don’t fit into the
traditional model of charitable work in Australia. That’s why our only
major successful bit of external funding so far was actually from the
Federal government Gov 2.0 Taskforce who funded the building of the
very initial prototype of PlanningAlerts.org.au.

So, in a word, a significant donation would provide an extraordinary
shot-in-the-arm to everything we do.

Then I laid out our plan with what we would do with the money.

Shortly after this exchange his significant donation came through.

The only reason I’m not including what I wrote there is I don’t want to spoil the surprises we have in store over the coming weeks and months. What I will say is that the donation will make it possible for us to create and launch at least two new major projects this year and we’re already hard at work on the first one!

On behalf of OpenAustralia Foundation and all Australians who care about democracy and transparency I want to thank Guy for his donation. It’s going to help make amazing things happen.

Illustration credit pupilasgustativas

Posted in Announcement, OpenAustralia Foundation | Tagged , , , , | 3 Responses

Opening up membership

By Henare Degan | Published: September 17, 2012

OpenAustralia contributorsWe want people who actively contribute to our projects to have a say in what we do, and how we do it so we’re opening up membership to the OpenAustralia Foundation.

If you’ve made a significant contribution to our projects in the past and you’re interested in becoming a member then please drop us a line – we’d love to hear from you.

Posted in Announcement, OpenAustralia Foundation | Tagged , , | 2 Responses

A Proposal to the Taskforce

By Matthew Landauer | Published: September 12, 2012

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 term.

He suggested that we apply to get that money, in a “one pager” when everything wrapped up.

I accidentally came across this email today while I was looking for something else and thought that it expressed a number of things quite well that we’ve been trying to achieve as well as throwing a few solid practical ideas into the mix.

We know that there was a lot of support for this proposal within the Taskforce itself. So, we were intrigued and a little deflated when this went no further.

I’m curious to know what happened to all that money. Maybe a cause for a Freedom of Information request?

This is was our proposal to the Taskforce:

When the Taskforce wraps up at the end of the year, we propose the Taskforce disburse any remaining unallocated funds by making a one off donation to the OpenAustralia Foundation.

OpenAustralia Foundation is a recently endorsed Charitable Institution in Australia. It is founded in the spirit of the UK’s mySociety and the USA’s Sunlight Foundation.

We work on making information from public bodies more accessible and useful for all Australians. OpenAustralia Foundation was started by the founders of the strictly non-partisan parliamentary transparency website http://www.openaustralia.org. Over the 15 months since it’s public launch the site has gained widespread acceptance and support with the public, government and across the political spectrum.

We are committed to lightweight organisation, open collaborative work and the production and promotion of useful and free tools for all Australians. We connect government, commercial and social enterprises. We are actively growing a volunteer community of people creating tools and mashups of information from government and public bodies, for the public good.

eg. Sydney Hackfest – facilitated by OpenAustralia, hosted/sponsored by Google, attended by technical community, using Government data for wider benefit of Australian people.

With grants and donated funds we can extend this good work. We would like to further help kick start new projects, enable and encourage others to take part in opening up democratic processes, and improve access to information from publicly funded organisations.

The OpenAustralia Foundation is a good vehicle to continue the aims and objectives of the Taskforce beyond the end of the year. Our objects, our endorsement as a charitable organisation, as well our commitment to financial transparency all reinforce this.

Seed funding to the OpenAustralia Foundation would be used to:

  • Fund at least one full time paid position for the OpenAustralia Foundation to work on things like project management, fundraising, volunteer coordination, education and outreach programmes.
  • Fund a modest office with space for at least one open “hot-desk” for anyone working in the area of government 2.0, transparency, public and government data to use for free.
  • As part of the office, create an “Office of Ideas”, a physical base where we can showcase our work, hold talks meetings and generally invite others in.
  • More easily connect with and activate technical communities in more states/territories by covering some interstate travel. Currently most success to date in engaging volunteers has been in our home city of Sydney where we have spent most time with them.
  • Give some money away as small grants like Sunlight do. http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/grants/application/

Seed funding would significantly expand our ability to start and improve projects.

In conclusion, we’ve given a significant personal investment over the last 18 months in creating our pilot project http://www.openaustralia.org and founding the OpenAustralia Foundation. We think we’ve done quite well so far. Help us take this, our fledgling Foundation, to the next level, and create a new playground for innovation and engagement in Australia. We’re already doing it, so do you want to help?

Update

After this post went up we were delighted to see John Sheridan, First Assistant Secretary, Agency Services at Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) came back straight away with some extremely helpful information that is very directly relevant. See the comment at the end.

There was $1m remaining when the Taskforce wound up and Microsoft decided to give that to the Government. That was split between the Attorney General’s Department, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and AGIMO.

It was also reported in the IT press.

Thanks John!

Posted in OpenAustralia Foundation | Tagged , , | 2 Responses

What’s new with PlanningAlerts, part 2

By Matthew Landauer | Published: September 10, 2012

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 tweaks, usability improvements, but on mass they represent some huge improvements overall.

Most of the changes have been focused on the application detail page. This is where you get the map and streetview of the application and links off to nearby applications and stats about the application itself. This is actually the page where over 70% of new people arrive at PlanningAlerts, most of the time by searching for a specific address on Google that they’re interested in.

A big part of what we’ve been trying to achieve with these changes is to take all those people that come to PlanningAlerts for the first time and firstly make PlanningAlerts really useful for them right then but more importantly try to get them to come back. The best way to keep in touch with planning applications in your area is by signing up to email alerts. You can totally forget about things until something of interest comes along and arrives in your email inbox.

So, we really want to get people signing up to those email alerts, especially new people that arrive on those application detail pages.

Here’s the requisite before and after screenshot.

Before

After

Improvements

Improvements to the application detail page, including:

  • Visual tweaks on application detail page – see those before and after screenshots
  • Make maps zoomable and draggeable
  • Removed display of tweets on application detail page – few people were using it
  • Remove clutter of nearby applications. Just replaced with a link
  • Made map and streetview work without javascript – accessibility is important to us. Not everyone has javascript enabled. So, we’ve made the map and streetview on the application detail page work even if you don’t have javascript enabled.
  • Added some simple hover effects to comments and some simple visual tweaks to visually separate different comments
  • We ran a bunch of A/B experiments:
    • Remove RSS feed
    • Put sign up form directly on the application detail page
    • Moving sign up form to the sidebar
    • Sign up form with email address on home page
    • Telling people how many people signed up to alerts on form
    • Test variation of button wording

Improvements to the backend, including:

  • Added Google analytics to mobile site – embarrassingly we managed to not have analytics for our mobile enabled site. Well that’s fixed now!
  • Began testing against Ruby 1.9.3 as well as Ruby 1.8.7 – in preparation for moving the whole site to using Ruby 1.9 which is faster and has better support for different text encoding.
  • Bring gems up to date (heaps of changes) – we were depending on a lot of very out-of-date libraries. We’ve brought most of them up to date.
  • Replaced administration backend with ActiveAdmin.
  • Added new relic monitoring – helps us understand the real performance of the site so that we could improve things for you.
  • Added bounding box optimisation to distance queries – we used to have this. When we upgraded to Rails 3, we lost this optimisation as we changed libraries for geo database lookups. We added this optimisation into the new library and contributed the change back to the community.
  • Various database speedups

Improvements related to scraping, including:

  • The PlanningAlerts application now grabs data directly from ScraperWiki rather than going through the scraper
  • Adding a new ScraperWiki scraper can now be done completely from the admin interface. Doesn’t require a code deploy.
  • Optimise scraping by collecting date range in one go – speeds things up considerably and lightens the load on ScraperWiki.
  • Show broken scrapers on coverage page – this is part of our strategy of exposing a little more of the underlying workings of PlanningAlerts in an attempt to make it easier for people with some programming skills to contribute to the site.
  • Improve integration of ScraperWiki and PlanningAlerts.
  • We also consolidated all the SPEAR authorities from Victoria into a single planning authority. This makes the difference between SPEAR and the local council clearer.

A bunch of improvements related to the API, including:

  • Added logging of API calls – we weren’t keeping tabs on the usage. We are now.
  • Made documentation of usage of API clearer on high volume & commercial use – nothing has actually changed about our policy here we just made it explicit. It used to be that we would discuss this stuff when people would get in touch with us.
  • Added throttling to API (configurable by source IP address) – to ensure that a single API user can’t bring the whole site down accidentally for everybody.

Some other improvements

  • Add vanity for A/B testing – rather than making small tweaks, hoping that it affects the change you want, we’re now using A/B testing using a gem called vanity where we show different variants of a page to different users and see which variant is more effective.
  • Open out the visual layout (get rid of margins at the side)
  • Rejig of volunteers list including adding new people (Added Kat, Andrew Perry, Maxious, and Justin Wells). Laying them out in a little grid and sorting them randomly.
  • Added new footer with direct links to other projects and contact info (twitter / email, etc..)
  • Improve menu with hover effect and larger selection area – this makes it easier to click around.
  • Only show the first ten applications in an email alert if there are more than 10 – this helps when we add a new planning authority with a large amount of historical data
  • Removed beta badge – A small but significant change. We removed the beta badge because we’re now coming up to 3 years old (in December) and hundreds of thousands of people have used the service.

Fixes

  • The following 20 scrapers were fixed which means that people in those areas can now use PlanningAlerts once again:
    • Penrith
    • Lane Cove
    • City of Greater Geelong
    • NSW Major Projects
    • Clarence City Council
    • City of Melbourne
    • Gosford
    • Parramatta
    • Kingston City Council
    • Knox City Council
    • Bankstown City Council
    • Sunshine Coast Regional Council
    • City of Yarra
    • Muswellbrook Shire Council
    • Fairfield City Council
    • City of Onkaparringa
    • Rockdale City Conucil
    • The Hills Council
    • Woollahra Municipal Council
    • City of Burnside
  • Site problem notifications
  • Fixed comment abuse report
  • Fixed problem with people on mobiles not being able to confirm registering for email alerts
  • Security update to Rails
  • Fix bounding box API call
  • Make XML sitemaps persistent between application deploys
  • Fixed a caching bug
  • Fixed distance unit bug
  • Fixed custom 404 page

As always let us know what you would like to see happen next!

Posted in Development, PlanningAlerts.org.au | Leave a comment

What’s new with PlanningAlerts, part 1

By Matthew Landauer | Published: September 5, 2012

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 digest and get a sense of the bigger picture changes that have been taking place.

We’ve also had a lot of technical debt to catch up on. What does that mean? PlanningAlerts has been going for coming up to 3 years and things inevitably break in that time. Changes get made, subtle breakages happen that nobody notices but these things have small incremental effects. Also, software libraries get out-of-date and need to be updated. We’ll cover some of those fixes in the next post.

But first the more interesting stuff, the new features!

So without much further ceremony…

New Features

  • See how many people received a particular application via email alerts – you can see this now on the detail page of every recent application
  • Added Twitter and Facebook share buttons – we want to make it easy for people to share applications on their networks
  • Get email notifications of new comments – so, if someone comments on an application within the area that you’re interested in, you’ll get notified of them in your normal email alert.
  • Designed a prototype email signup widget – So that third-party websites (such as local councils) can make it super-easy for their constituents to sign up to email alerts on PlanningAlerts.
  • Each authority now has its own page including statistics (apps received last week, median apps per week, etc..), the number of applications received over time, link to ScraperWiki scraper and the authority population – This allows you to quickly get an overview of what’s happening within a particular planning authority. Also useful for developers who want to fix or check a scraper)
  • Added percentage of population covered. This is now automatically generated.
  • New documentation on how to write a scraper – we’re now using ScraperWiki (http://scraperwiki.com) for any new planning authorities. This makes it really easy to get started writing a scraper. You can do everything from your web browser. You don’t even need to set up a local development environment. Our aim here is to significantly lower the barrier of entry to someone with some basic programming skills to come along and contribute to the project.
  • New documentation on how to lobby your local council – we also want to make it easier for people without programming skills to contribute. So, we added a page about how you can lobby your local council to publish their planning data in a machine readable format.

We also added 5 new planning authorities:

  • Liquor License applications for Victoria
  • City of Launceston, TAS
  • Unley, SA
  • Development Assesment Panels, WA
  • City of Perth, WA

City of Perth and the Development Assessment Panels required scraping pdf documents. Not an easy task!

Next in part 2, we’ll cover the myriad of improvements to existing features, some small, some large.

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

And we’re back

By Kat Szuminska | Published: August 27, 2012

It’s been a quiet kind of year for the OpenAustralia Foundation. While we’ve seen maintenance work continue quietly in the background, upgraded OpenAustralia.org to catch up with changes at the official Federal parliamentary website aph.gov.au, ran Election Leaflets for the 2012 Queensland State Election, made Github our primary code host so we can accept more contributions via pull requests, fixed 3 PlanningAlerts scrapers, added 5 more authorities to PlanningAlerts, added continuous integration to automatically test our project’s code, kept up to date with removing retiring politicians and adding new ones, fixed error reporting on PlanningAlerts so we’re notified when there’s a problem, and answered dozens of emails from Australians that use our projects, BUT we’ve not started any major new projects this year.

That’s all about to change. In the last couple of weeks we’ve been picking up the pace.

Last week Matthew, Henare and I met up and agreed it would be good to share what we’re doing as we go along and gathered a few statistics. But tickets on our issue tracker only tell a story for the insatiably curious geek. So, rather than quote statistics, we came up with a little reporting format for our new weekly meetings and use that now as a basis to share with you what we’ve been up to.

It felt like a productive week for Henare and Matthew. Scoping was completed on a couple of new projects, a decision on which one to go ahead with was made which leads to a clear direction for the next few weeks work for all of us.

Planning Alerts
An email came through last week alerting us to a development which has not been reported by PlanningAlerts. Normally PlanningAlerts sends alerts to people, not the other way round! Checking up on what went wrong, I quickly discover that this feed from the council was broken and so are a few others. Eek! Wasting no time, Matthew and Henare got on the case to fix 8 councils’ data feeds almost immediately. Hurrah!
Find out more: To see which planning authorities are currently covered by PlanningAlerts go to http://www.planningalerts.org.au/authorities

OpenAustralia
Oh no! Due to changes in the parliamentary data feed OpenAustralia.org fell over, with no updates from the House of Reps or the Senate for a big chunk of 2012. Thanks to Henare and Justin Wells this service is slap bang up to date again with all the debates to the present day.

Way back in January 2009 we were the first website to bring the parliamentary register of interests online.  We’re pleased to note that following our example, the official parliament website now has the latest Registers of Interests online and discoverable for both the Senate and House of Reps. If you’d like to help us update the collated Registers on Senators and Reps pages that we have at OpenAustralia.org, then please  stick your hand up!

Secret Squirrel
Last week we looked at a couple of contenders for the OpenAustralia Foundation’s Next Big Thing. Last week Matthew and Henare took a project each and assessed the technical work to get going on the two standouts. To our delight they both look doable in very reasonable timeframes, so we’re optimistic about completing them both. Since we’ve spent a while now focused on local level projects, we decide our next project to be one with federal scope (at least to begin with).

A lot happens behind the curtains at the OpenAustralia Foundation. Are you curious to find out more? What you’re interested in hearing about? Tell us and we’ll see if we can include it in our next update!

Posted in Announcement, ElectionLeaflets.org.au, OpenAustralia Foundation, OpenAustralia.org, PlanningAlerts.org.au, Projects | Leave a comment

Visualising the Society and the Personal

By Matthew Landauer | Published: August 10, 2012

I just finished watching Hans Rosling’s documentary for the BBC “The Joy of Stats”.

Hans Rosling is the ebullient swedish professor who came to widespread public recognition through his passionate TED talks where he used statistics to unravel and debunk many widespread myths and misunderstandings about world health and the third world.

The documentary “The Joy of Stats” is a one hour whistle-stop tour of the history and power of statistics to predict and understand our world.

And it got me thinking.

Rosling, like many others, predicts that visualisation has the power to transform the way we think of data and allow us to understand and interpret vast amounts of information.

“Visualisations tell us stories”, he says

Or do they?

Hans Rosling is a remarkable story teller. The TED talks which brought him to mainstream attention are a fabulous example of a man telling a story with three acts, emotional arcs and a wisdom all illustrated with pictures and animations. He finishes, leaving you entertained, excited and above all informed.

Here’s the crux. It wasn’t the picture, the visualisation, telling a story. It was Hans Rosling! I’m sure that if I had seen the data and the visualisations without his explanation, I would have only had the smallest amount of insight. You need lots of other contextual information to make sense of it all.

Now, I don’t want to say that this all a big waste of time. It definitely isn’t.

But as an individual person looking at some information that’s been visualised, what am I supposed to do with it?

I think real insight often comes with a razor sharp focus. In this case, Hans Rosling is the person with that focus.

This brings me to the second part of what struck me after watching the programme. It’s to do with the visualising data about a large group of people versus visualising data for one person.

Statistics developed out of a need to understand what society as a whole was doing. How many people are dying? What’s the average life expectancy? Is our population growing or shrinking?

The answers to those questions are used by politicians and policymakers to affect change on the societal level.

We’re using the outcome of statistics to pull levers to affect change to all of society to get an outcome that we want.

Something of the language that Hans Rosling used puzzled me. I think it’s been bothering me a while because lots of people do this.

It’s implied that visualising data is a way for ordinary people to understand and interpret data themselves, effectively giving them access to the same analytical machinery that once was only available to the few, in the process democratising the machinery of decision making.

I think this is an important and truly revolutionary goal but the way that we’re going about it is missing the mark.

Why?

Because we’re still tending to think about visualisations from the point of view of someone very far off the ground, seeing the actions of the people as little ants scurrying around.

To make visualisation a democratic tool we need to make visualisations that allow us to make decisions about our own lives.

And I don’t mean, “by looking at this data I can see that there is a strong correlation between smoking and lung cancer. I don’t want to get lung cancer. Therefore, I shouldn’t smoke.”

Boring!

Correlations and statistics by their very nature can not say “if you smoke, you will die twenty years earlier”. It’s only a statistical link. So their ability to persuade anybody to do something is very limited.

So then how do we make a visualisation personal?

Focus on the concrete.

Let me give you a simple example. It’s not strictly a visualisation, but it illustrates the point quite well.

Let’s say that every house on your street is roughly the same size with about the same number of people living in them and imagine that each house has an electricity meter in it which records power usage and stores that information. Let’s say that there is data for the last year.

What could you do with that?

You could draw some graphs that would show the average energy use of a house on the street and show how it changes over the year. You might discover that there is a large spike during the summer. You look deeper and find out that’s because everyone is running their air-conditioner. That’s an example of using that data in a very top-down way, looking at the little people from above.

What if instead you could see whether your energy use over the last hour was lower or higher than the average of your neighbours’ ?

You could actually use that information in a very tangible practical way. You might discover that when your refrigator makes a noise and kicks in there’s a spike in your energy use and suddenly you’re using more energy than your neighbours.

Or let’s say you don’t make it about competition with your neighbours but rather with yourself. What if you just see if your energy use is lower or higher than your own energy use exactly a year ago? If you wanted to reduce your energy use you would have a really tangible and simple tool to help you do that.

I think this whole discussion also has an influence on the kinds of information we should be working towards getting governments to release.

Currently, the focus appears to be on the kind of information that comes from the top down approach. For instance, here in Australia, the gold standard for open government data right now is the Australian Bureau of Statistics that have for some time now released large amounts of census data in good machine readable formats available under licenses that allow liberal reuse. It’s amazing what you can find there.

But, it’s very hard to see how to create a personal visualisation out of any of it.

So, we have a challenge.

What data should we get from government which we can use to create visualisations that can allow a person to make decisions about their life?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Little OpenAustralia Hackfest, Big Results

By Henare Degan | Published: September 15, 2011

Cross-posted on the Official Google Australia Blog.

A couple of weeks ago we at the OpenAustralia Foundation – Australia’s open data, open government and civic hacking charity – asked if anyone wanted to join three of our volunteers at Google Sydney for a hackfest. The request was deliberately casual as we just wanted have a bit of fun over a weekend sharing what we where doing and working on the open source projects that OpenAustralia runs.

The hackfest started on Saturday with about a dozen volunteers coming along and listening to quick introductory talks from Matthew and myself. We reminded everyone of the different projects that the foundation runs: OpenAustralia.org, Election Leaflets and PlanningAlerts.

Most people decided to hack on PlanningAlerts, a project which allows people to get alerts about what is being built or knocked down in their area. Using an online tool called ScraperWiki you can quickly and easily contribute new planning authorities to PlanningAlerts. During the two afternoons (true hackers aren’t morning people!) our volunteers took up the challenge to write ScraperWiki scrapers for PlanningAlerts with zeal.

Seven people wrote scrapers for nineteen planning authorities like Hobart City Council, Redfern-Waterloo Authority or Townsville City Council all around Australia, including councils in two states we previously didn’t cover – Western Australia and Tasmania.

What does this mean in practical terms? An additional 1,823,124 Australians can now find out what’s happening in their local community using PlanningAlerts. This is a huge result, coming from a relatively modest effort and a small group of people.

A massive thank you to all of the volunteers that attended the hackfest, especially the following people that wrote scrapers: Sam Cavenagh, Nick Evershed, Mark Kinkade, Matthew Landauer, James Polley, Kris Splittgerber and Adam Stiskala. Let’s do this again some time.

And don’t forget to remind your friends and family to sign up for PlanningAlerts!

Posted in Announcement, Development, OpenAustralia Foundation, PlanningAlerts.org.au, Projects | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

PlanningAlerts for my mum (and the Northern Territory)

By Henare Degan | Published: September 9, 2011

My mum called me from Sydney Airport yesterday. She was stopping over from New Zealand on her way to Batchelor in the Northern Territory where her and her husband are moving.

After I got off the phone to her I remembered that PlanningAlerts didn’t cover anywhere in the NT and I also remembered – what mother doesn’t love code written for her!

So I got to work and found that there seems to be a single planning authority in the NT, the Northern Territory Lands Group. After an hour or so I’d been able to write a ScraperWiki scraper for this data and deploy it to the live site, which means PlanningAlerts now covers another 229,675 people in the Territory.

Welcome to Australia mum and welcome to PlanningAlerts Territorians!


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If you live in the territory and you’ve signed up for PlanningAlerts you should already be getting alerts. If you have friends or family in the territory, please let them know about PlanningAlerts.

Cheers,

Henare
OpenAustralia Foundation volunteer

P.S. If anyone has any more information about the NT planning system that I may have missed or information about any other planning systems around Australia that might be of interest, please let us know in the comments.

P.P.S. If your mum lives in an area not covered by PlanningAlerts, why not write a scraper for her today? No need to wait for Mother’s Day, mums like code all year ’round :)

P.P.P.S. Come to our hackfest tomorrow if you want to learn how to write your mum a PlanningAlerts scraper.

Posted in Announcement, PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Responses