OpenAustralia Hackfest – “What are you up to next weekend?” edition

By Henare Degan | Published: August 30, 2011

Come and join Henare, Tim and Matthew in their basement, er.. we mean Google Sydney, for an awesome weekend of hacking.

OpenAustralia Hackfest 2009 by Halans

It’s all a bit last minute. What’s the worst that happens? Nobody turns up and the three of us spend the weekend hacking. That’s okay too.

However, it would be much more fun if you came too!

We’ve got a couple of quick talks lined up to warm you up and give you some inspiration, then a full weekend dedicated to hacking on everything OpenAustralia. Come along and learn, share and build interesting things in and around open data, open government and civic hacking.

Want to reboot OpenAustralia.org by fixing the scraper? How about some finishing touches to Election Leaflets to monitor future Australian elections? Or do you want to learn how to help tens of thousands of people get PlanningAlerts by writing a simple scraper (anyone can do it!)? Then register here:

https://oa-hackfest.eventbrite.com/

This event will be hosted at Google Sydney next weekend the 10th and 11th of September, here’s our plan for the weekend:

Saturday

11:30 – Doors open
12:00 – Introduction and housekeeping
12:15 – The Gears That Power the Tubes of OpenAustralia – Matthew Landauer
12:30 – An Introduction to Guerrilla Data Liberation with ScraperWiki – Henare Degan
12:45 – Let the hacking begin
18:00 – We’ll order pizzas with anyone interested
22:00 – Doors close

Sunday

11:30 – Doors open / Let the hacking begin
16:00 – Stop hacking, start presentations – show us what you’ve build, fixed or learnt!
18:00 – Doors close, optional beers at the pub

Google are kindly supplying the venue, power and WiFi so all you need to do is bring along your notebook, some snacks to keep you hacking through the day and pizza money if you’re a hungry hacker come Saturday evening.

Sign up to the OpenAustralia Community mailing list if you have any questions and don’t forget to tag your tweets, photos, etc. #oahack

Cheers,

Henare, Matthew and Tim
OpenAustralia Foundation volunteers

Posted in Announcement, Development, ElectionLeaflets.org.au, OpenAustralia Foundation, OpenAustralia.org, PlanningAlerts.org.au, Projects | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Response

Archive of 2010 Australian Federal Election leaflets available

By Henare Degan | Published: June 15, 2011

You may recall that when we ran Election Leaflets for the 2011 NSW State Election, we stopped displaying leaflets from the 2010 Federal Election when you browsed the site. This was simply because we didn’t have the time or resources to build the site in such a way that you could see these leaflets.

We’ve had a few requests over the last few months for access to these leaflets so we’ve set up an archive site that allows you to see them: federal2010.electionleaflets.org.au

This is by no means a permanent solution for being able to use the site for multiple elections – us geeks would call it a hack. To run Election Leaflets for another election, we still need interested volunteers or organisations willing to fund the work required to provide Australia with live election monitoring. Please contact us if you can help.

Posted in Announcement, ElectionLeaflets.org.au | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

PlanningAlerts closes the loop

By Henare Degan | Published: June 7, 2011

Our built environment has a huge impact on our lives. And we all have strong opinions about what it should be like.

One of the major things that determines this is the planning process that our councils look after. If you’ve ever tried to make a submission on a development application you will know that it can be a difficult process to understand. Chances are you’ve not bothered because it all seemed like too much trouble.

Today we want to let you know about a new PlanningAlerts feature which makes this simple. Now when you click on a development application, you’ll be able to make a submission to council right on the PlanningAlerts page for the application – no more hunting down the right form, email address or even which council to send it to. We do the boring stuff for you automatically.

Commenting on a PlanningAlert

This means you have the opportunity to directly affect whether an application will get approved or not. It “closes the loop”, so that not only do you find out about things planned near you, you can easily and directly do something about them.

You also get to see what other people have said because all comments automatically go up on the site once they’re sent to the planning authority.

Over the next couple of weeks we will be rolling out the new feature, adding it council by council. When the feature has been rolled out for your council you will see the big new comment box. If it hasn’t been rolled out yet you can help by finding the email address that submissions should go to for your council and sending that to us.

As this feature is brand new it’s bound to have some niggling problems. So, please help by letting us know about any problems that you find or things that could be done to improve the service.

To get started go to http://www.planningalerts.org.au/ and enter your street address.

It’s your neighbourhood. Make sure you have a hand in how it develops.

Matthew and Henare
OpenAustralia Foundation Volunteers

Posted in Announcement, PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Responses

People of NSW – start your scanners!

By Henare Degan | Published: February 2, 2011

…or mobile phone cameras.

We have just over seven weeks until the NSW State Election and it’s going to be bitter. Leaflets are already in the news and people have been calling on us to run Election Leaflets during this election.

Luckily Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell and I recently attended linux.conf.au in Brisbane and as we did last year we decided to spend what little free time we had hacking on OpenAustralia Foundation projects.

This time we chose Election Leaflets and the good news is we’ve done it. I’m very pleased to announce that we’re running Election Leaflets for the 2011 NSW State Election.

From today, when you visit ElectionLeaflets.org.au you’ll see election leaflets that have been uploaded by people all over the state that want to make a difference before they vote.

If you want to make a difference, gather up some leaflets and start uploading.

Wait, where are the Federal election leaflets?

UPDATE: There’s now an archive site of the 2010 Federal Election Leaflets available.

That’s a good question. Rest assured, they’re still there. They just won’t show up when you browse the website (but are still visible if you know an old link).

We haven’t yet built a way to show these leaflets at the same time, but we’re working on it.

As always, we could do with a hand so please volunteer or donate today.

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

Embedding PlanningAlerts in a map just got a whole lot nicer

By Matthew Landauer | Published: February 2, 2011

We’ve a made a pretty small change to the way that applications from PlanningAlerts can get embedded in a map that makes it much easier to use.

It’s easiest to see with an example:

View Larger Map

When you click on one of the points on a map, as well as the description of the development application, there is now a link “More Information” which takes you to the page on PlanningAlerts for that application.

That simple change just made embedded maps a whole lot more useful.

This is how to do it for yourself:

  1. Enter a street address on www.planningalerts.org.au and click Search.
  2. Copy the URL of the link to “Subscribe to an RSS feed for applications near here”
  3. Then go to Google Maps, paste that URL into its search box
  4. Add ?style=html to the end of the URL in the search box. This is the new bit that adds the “More information” link.
  5. Click Search Maps
  6. Click the Link link to the top right of the map, and copy the Paste HTML to embed in website code
  7. Paste that code into your blog post, sidebar, or wherever (you can alter the code to change its size etc.)
Posted in PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , , | 1 Response

Our day at Open Day

By Henare Degan | Published: January 30, 2011

We were recently invited to host a stall at the linux.conf.au 2011 Open Day. linux.conf.au is one of the world’s premier free software conferences and is run each year by the community. Open Day is held on the Saturday after the conference and is open to the general public to learn about free and open source software.

Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell and I attended the conference all week and had an excellent time learning lots and meeting interesting people. We volunteered to run the OpenAustralia stall yesterday the 29th of January and it turned out to be a great day.

OpenAustralia volunteers showing the public our projects

We got the chance to meet a whole host of people who had never heard of us and educate them about what we do and what our projects have to offer. It was interesting to find that some people had heard of one of our projects, really enjoyed using it, but were not aware that we run a variety of projects.

We also gave away a bunch of OpenAustralia “Hack Democracy” t-shirts to grinning Open Day attendees.

Open Day visitors show of their new shirts

We’d like to congratulate all of the organisers and volunteers that made linux.conf.au such a success in 2011, against amazing odds. We’d especially like to thank Clinton Roy for heading up the organisation of Open Day and inviting the Foundation to host a stall.

See you next year in Ballarat!

Cheers,

Tim and Henare
OpenAustralia Volunteers

PS. Those that came along to Open Day got an exclusive early announcement of something very special. Stay tuned for more news on this blog in a few days time :)

Posted in Announcement, OpenAustralia Foundation | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Response

Wonderful new features for PlanningAlerts

By Henare Degan | Published: December 6, 2010

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve added some wonderful new features to PlanningAlerts which are the start of something big.

Until now, the focus of PlanningAlerts has been squarely and clearly about notifying you of new development applications in your area. That notification happens via email.

We’ve added two new big features which allow you to easily explore development applications and comment on them.

Commenting

Finding out about a new development application in your neighbourhood should be the start of something. If it’s something that you agree with or disagree with the standard course of action is that you submit a comment on the development application to your local council.

Really, there should be a way for the community at large to discuss these issues without the local council having to act as an intermediary. Of course, this already happens on the Internet in the form of people writing blog posts, talking on Twitter and Facebook and numerous other avenues.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see all those conversations in one place, alongside the development application itself? Then, the application page becomes a jumping off point to read what people think all over the place.

To begin with, this is what we’ve done: now whenever you tweet about a development application, and include a link to the PlanningAlerts page, it will be listed on our site:

We’re hoping this will spark discussion and make PlanningAlerts even more useful by allowing people to provide additional information about the development application.

One use of this could be taking a photo with your mobile phone (after find the location using our augmented reality mobile application, of course) and tweeting about it. The link will then show up on PlanningAlerts, allowing others to see what the new development looks like.

Give it a try and let us know what interesting uses you come up with by posting a comment.

Exploring

We’ve also changed the home page. You can now enter a street address and it will immediately show you recent development applications nearby. No need to wait on receiving your first email alert.

This is great for people who’ve never used the service before. They get a taste of what it does before they commit to entering their email address:

We hope you enjoy these new features and don’t forget you can help us improve them by posting a comment below, using the feedback button on PlanningAlerts or, even better, getting involved yourself.

Henare, Kat and Matthew

Posted in Announcement, PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Who is the mysterious filtering software provider?

By Matthew Landauer | Published: November 24, 2010

In our last post we brought to attention the strange case of one of our project websites openaustralia.org being blocked from access by employees of the department of Customs. To our surprise this was then picked up by Fairfax media and even raised by Mia Garlick, Assistant Secretary, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy at a recent Government 2.0 conference in Canberra.

A few people believe this to be a storm in a teacup. For example, one commentor, JP, said

Oh, grow up. It’s not bizarre, it’s routine. So is the solution: short-term, request that Customs whitelist the site; long-term, request that their filtering provider reclassify it.

So, here’s what happened next. October 30 I sent this:

Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2010 11:18:38 +1100
Subject: Re: FW: RE: Query about Customs access to openaustralia.org
[SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] [T20101020000LS040Z80472]
From: Matthew Landauer
To: information@customs.gov.au

Hello [redacted],

Thanks very much for your response and the response of the IT security
section.

I would like to clarify a point. The website www.openaustralia.org is
absolutely not a blog. The website republishes the Federal Hansard, the
Federal proceedings of Parliament, which definitely doesn’t fall under the
definition of a blog as was presented in the forwarded message from the IT
security section.

I understand from your email that the classification of
www.openaustralia.org as a blog was undertaken by a third party who provides
your internet filtering technology.

Could you please let me know who provides this third party internet
filtering so that I could contact them and address this error of
classification with them directly as it undoubtedly affects not just your
department but other organisations who use the same internet filtering
technology.

All the best,
Matthew Landauer

After most of the week goes by without a reply or any kind of acknowledgment I send another quick email

Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2010 13:22:35 +1100
Subject: Fwd: FW: RE: Query about Customs access to openaustralia.org
[SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] [T20101020000LS040Z80472]
From: Matthew Landauer
To: information@customs.gov.au

Hello [redacted],

Could you please let me know an ETA for when I might expect a reply to my
previous email.

Thank you.

All the best,
Matthew Landauer

Then

Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2010 07:55:45 +1100 (EST)
To: Matthew Landauer
Subject: RE: Fwd: FW: RE: Query about Customs access to openaustralia.org [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] [T20101020000LS010Z84292]
From: information@customs.gov.au

Matthew

The response to your original email is the only one I have seen. The decision would lay with our IT Security Section and Customs Management to determine the applicability of access to web sites external to the Customs website.

I never saw your email dated October 30 and cannot see what happened with that email.

I will again forward your email to our IT Security section for their consideration and possible response.

I cannot provide a time frame for a response or any further details.

Regards

[redacted]

I thanked him for his email and said that I was looking forward to the response from the IT security section.

Then, silence.

Monday last week I sent a follow up reminder email asking for any updates. Silence again.

I would like to get this issue resolved as quickly as possible. Until it’s resolved, employees of this government department do not have access to a very useful tool for keeping abreast of developments in Federal parliament.

We’re currently at step one. It’s been nearly a month trying to find out who provides the departments’ internet filtering software.

As an outsider trying to help resolve this situation, it is extremely difficult. If there are issues with giving this information out, then nobody has said that.

You would think this would be a simple matter to resolve.

Posted in OpenAustralia.org | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Blog stopped at customs in bizarre case of mistaken identity

By Matthew Landauer | Published: October 28, 2010

In a bizarre case of mistaken identity the department of Customs and Border Protection appear to think that OpenAustralia.org‘s republishing of Federal parliamentary discussions constitutes a blog.

Last week we were told by a person who works for the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service that OpenAustralia.org was blocked by their IT department’s security policy. It happened that they wanted to use email alerts to stay informed on issues relating to customs policy discussed in the Federal parliament. So, clearly, they were wanting to use the site for a very sensible, work related activity.

A few minutes later, after prompting on Twitter, I fired off an email to the Australian Customs

From:”Matthew Landauer” <matthew@openaustralia.org>
Sent:Wednesday, 20 October 2010 12:08:31 PM
To: information@customs.gov.au
Cc: contact@openaustralia.org
Subject: Query about Customs access to openaustralia.org

Dear Sir / Madam,

We just were told by a person who works for Customs that one of our websites http://www.openaustralia.org, which republishes the Federal proceedings of Parliament, which is run by a charity, the OpenAustralia Foundation, has been blocked from internal use inside the department.

Firstly, is this true?

Secondly, if this is true, what is your reason for blocking access given that there are many legitimate work uses for openaustralia.org within your department?

Thank for your time.

All the best,
Matthew Landauer

This morning I received this reply

Hello Matthew

We have received the following response from our IT Security Section:

The website http://www.openaustralia.org and it’s charity foundation http://blog.openaustralia.org/foundation/ are classified by the filtering software in use by the Australian Customs and Border protection service as ‘blogs’.

The Australian Customs and Border Protection does not allow general access to websites classified as ‘blogs’ at the present time to due to the threat websites within this category can pose to the security of the Australian Customs and Border Protection network. It is important to note that the filter list is provided by a third party and the Australian Custom and Border Protection service simply consumes this list. We do not make decisions on what category a website should be placed in.

If a business requirement exists for a user or groups of users to access content that is unavailable, they can request an exemption which will be granted after the appropriate approvals have been sought.

The classification of ‘blog’ is defined as below

Sites which contain ‘blogs’ (an abridgment of the term ‘web logs’). Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. Examples include:
Commentary on particular subjects such as news or politics
Online diaries
Photo blogs
Audio and video blogs
Regards

[name redacted] | Senior Customs and Border Protection Officer |Customs Information and Support Centre | CE&CS
Australian Customs and Border Protection Service
Customs House, 10 Cooks River Ave, Mascot NSW 2020
Phone I 1300 363 263
Fax I (02) 8339 6714
Email: information@customs.gov.au
Website: www.customs.gov.au

This information is provided as a guide only and should be clarified either by lodging a formal advice request with the appropriate section of Customs or employing the services of a customs broker if appropriate.

Irrespective of whether you think government departments should be blocking blogs as a matter of “security” policy, anyone who has spent more than a passing minute looking at OpenAustralia.org will know that it is most definitely not a blog, but rather republishes the Federal Hansard, the official proceedings of the Australian parliament.

This website blog.openaustralia.org is a blog. So, block this if you must (not that anyone inside Customs can read this, of course) but don’t block www.openaustralia.org. That’s just silly.

Posted in OpenAustralia.org | 15 Responses

Clock has run out on Victorian election monitoring

By Henare Degan | Published: October 25, 2010

On Saturday the 27th of November 2010 Victorians are going to the polls with the very big job of electing their next state government. That is a little over a month away.

Two weeks ago, a few of us who had worked on ElectionLeaflets.org.au during the Federal election got together to talk about what we should do next with the site.

With the upcoming Victorian election it seemed clear. Let’s make ElectionLeaflets work for the Victorian election as well.

We set today as our deadline for launching it.

Well, to cut a long story short, the disappointing thing is that we haven’t made it. We won’t be launching that site today.

There are a few reasons for this.

Firstly, remember that despite ElectionLeaflets being run by a charity, don’t assume that anyone is being paid to work on this. Quite the contrary, all the work that has gone into the site, setting it up, designing it, publicising it and talking to the media about it has all been done by unpaid volunteers.

We were hoping that adding support for multiple elections to ElectionLeaflets would be relatively straightforward, as the original developers had already thought about this from the beginning. However, it turned out to not be completely trivial. To make the required changes would need a bit of work – probably a few more full days effort.

We’re pretty good at getting things done on the smell of an oily rag and very little time but in this case with only one weekend, a few short evenings, and only two developers available, we simply ran out of time.

Despite the widespread media coverage and praise of ElectionLeaflets during the Federal election campaign, nobody came forward to say “Here’s a donation to support the running of the site and to ensure that it can be around for future elections.”

If that had happened we could have sponsored a developer to focus on this full time. It wouldn’t have taken much.

Donations for the site would also help pay for the PO Box that we rent to collect posted leaflets and help pay for the hosting of the leaflet images on Amazon’s S3 service.

Secondly, beyond the original core team of a dozen or so volunteers, we haven’t had many other people approach us offering their help to make this happen.

This is where you come in – our next goal is to cover the New South Wales state election in March 2011. The last couple of weeks has reminded us all that projects like this don’t build themselves and we need people that are as passionate as we are about keeping our elections fair and honest.

You can help shape this exciting project, and feel good knowing you’ve made a difference to electioneering in Australia. You’ll also be supported by a talented and diverse group of volunteers that are keen to share their skills and experience.

So if you want to see ElectionLeaflets cover the next election you’re called to vote in, you can start by making a donation, telling your friends about ElectionLeaflets, asking us questions on the mailing list, checking the existing trouble tickets, or even downloading our open source code and diving straight in.

If you’re not sure how to get started, please let us know in the comments how we can better help you get involved.

Henare and Matthew
OpenAustralia Foundation volunteers

PS. Victorians can still send their physical leaflets to:

Riley & Ephemera Collection,
C/O Australian History & Literature Team Access and Information Division State Library of Victoria,
328 Swanston Street,
Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia

Donors should include their name and contact details if they would like an acknowledgment of their donation and they only accept hardcopy donations (not scanned copies, or photographs).

Posted in Development, ElectionLeaflets.org.au | Tagged , , , | 1 Response