Inaugural OpenAustralia Hackfest Was Terrific

By Henare Degan | Published: June 15, 2009

Last Saturday, the 13th of June, was OpenAustralia’s inaugural hackfest, bringing together developers and users of the OpenAustralia.org website. Fifty people volunteered their time and effort to help open Australia’s democracy and make it easier for Australians to keep tabs on their representatives in Parliament.

The day kicked off just after midday with Matthew giving us a run down of how we can get involved and contribute to OpenAustralia (see below for a reminder). After that, the 40-strong participants worked in groups on projects they were interested in, fixing bugs or just getting their heads around how the OA code works.

Projects

There were a number of projects worked on during the day, here’s some details on just a few of these:

Mobile OpenAustralia

Rob Manson began work on a mobile version of OpenAustralia so you’ll be able to see an optimised version of the site when you’re on the move.

Video

Silvia Pfeiffer started investigating and discussing advanced video on OpenAustralia, using open codecs like Ogg Theora and Vorbis and the upcoming HTML5 video specification. Take a look at Metavid for an idea of what to look forward to in the future.

WordPress Plugin

Sherif made excellent progress developing a WordPress plugin for OpenAustralia, which will allow you to quote speeches from OpenAustralia in your WordPress blog. It is the first new development to use our API and we can expect the code to be released in the next few weeks.

Development Introduction

I (Henare Degan) helped some people get the code up-and-running in their development environment so they can see how it works and hopefully start contributing. There were quite a few questions during the day so if you’re stuck on anything or have any questions, don’t forget to send a mail to the development mailing list. There’s a bunch of people ready to help you, and we’re bound to learn something along the way too!

Statistics

During the day we had:

  • Five total commits, two to the web application and three to the parser
  • Nine issues in total updated in the bug tracker, with four issues resolved
  • A number of new developers added to the bug tracker so there’s now over 10 people that can update tickets

There’s a lot more effort that’s not in these numbers that hopefully will be coming out in the days ahead as people start releasing their results from the day.

Pretty impressive for a first effort I think, as Matthew says, “Give yourself a big pat on the back!”.

Get Involved

Matthew gave a great introduction where he reminded us of how we can all get involved:

Thanks again to the core organisers, Matthew, Kat and Sarah for initiating such an excellent event, thanks to Google, Tim and James for an excellent venue and facilities but thanks most of all to everyone that came and made it the great day it was.

We can’t wait to see you all again at the next OpenAustralia Hackfest.

PS. Don’t forget to tag your photos and tweets about the day oah09 so we can all find them

Update 18/06/09: Minor typo

Posted in Announcement, Development | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Responses

First OpenAustralia hackfest is tomorrow!

By Matthew Landauer | Published: June 12, 2009

What an oversight. I’ve not blogged about our first ever OpenAustralia hackfest which is taking place in Sydney tomorrow, kindly hosted at the offices of Google Sydney.

We announced it on the @openaustralia twitter feed, our development mailing list and on a couple of Linux users group mailing list and very quickly filled our capacity of 50 people who have registered to attend.

It promises to be a busy, fun and exciting day!

There will be WIFI. There will be power. There will be projectors, so we can do demos for each other. There will be whiteboards…

Posted in Announcement | Leave a comment

Government is heavy user of openaustralia.org email alerts

By Kat Szuminska | Published: May 12, 2009

A recent remark about government users of our website, and our recent exchanges with the DPS made me wonder, just how many people@gov.au are signed up for our email alerts as part of their daily routine? I asked Matthew to take a look at the stats, so he did, and this is the result.

So about a quarter of people on email alerts, that’s hundreds of people, work for government and that’s just the ones using their work email address. No wonder www.aph.gov.au is asking “what other websites are good examples” in its own user survey? Maybe its time for someone in government to talk to us directly?

  • com includes everyone in .com.au and .com
  • org includes everyone in .org.au and .org
  • gov is everyone in .gov.au (.gov not included)
  • net is everyone in .net.au (.net not included)
  • edu is everyone in .edu.au (.edu not included)

Posted in Development | Leave a comment

A response from the DPS

By Matthew Landauer | Published: May 11, 2009

After our recent post we finally received a response from the Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS):

from: Web, Manager (DPS) <WebManager@aph.gov.au>
to: Matthew Landauer
date: Fri, May 1, 2009 at 5:46 PM
subject: RE: Hansard 23 September 2008 probably error in division

Dear Matthew

Thank you for your email to the APH web manager identifying a possible error in a division in Hansard for 23 September 2008.

Thank you for your patience while we investigated the error identified. Changes to Hansard, once they are past the ‘proof’ stage and are regarded as ‘official’, take some time to investigate and obtain approval to change.

For the future if you, or someone else from Open Australia, send us a correction, the Hansard area or web manager will undertake to respond within a fortnight, regardless of the outcome.

Hansard have investigated the matter you raised. The code for Mark Vaile was used in error, rather than that of Dana Vale (who was missing from the division). We’ve corrected and reloaded the Hansard to the web (both in ParlInfo Search and the daily PDFs on the APH website) to reflect this.

In your email you also mention that you identify spelling mistakes, formatting errors and logical inconsistencies in Hansard from time to time. We would appreciate it if you would continue to send these to the APH web manager email address. The web manager will then forward it to the relevant area. We will investigate, including retrieving and listening to the audio, if necessary, to check what the original speaker actually said. Where the error is within the Hansard (as in this case) we will fix it, though we may need to assess other changes against editorial guidelines. Where we are not able to access the audio to check, the normal procedure is to not change the Hansard, unless the error is clearly in the transcription. We do not have access to all previous audio, though we maintain it longer for chambers (years) than committees (months).

Thanks again for your help.

Kind regards,

Parliamentary Web Manager
Department of Parliamentary Services
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600

This is how I responded:

from: Matthew Landauer
to: Web, Manager (DPS) <WebManager@aph.gov.au>
date: Mon, May 11, 2009 at 6:21 PM
subject: RE: Hansard 23 September 2008 probably error in division

Dear anonymous web person / web manager,

Thanks for your email and the effort you put into checking and
correcting the error with Mark Vaile’s code.

We also appreciate your assurance that someone will respond to any
future Hansard correction within two weeks. However, we are not a
watchdog. It is not our aim to count errors. Rather we need your site
to work and the data to be accurate and we need to be able to
communicate effectively with you.

We specifically asked for a technical contact at the department which
you have so far not provided nor even acknowledged. We’re waiting for
you to respond to that request.

Whether or not you are able to provide details of a technical contact,
we would still like a response from you. If you are not able to
provide that access to a technical contact, we’ll need information
from you on why it isn’t possible. This should include the name and
contact details of the person who is responsible for this particular
decision.

Another anonymous email will just not do for this purpose.

We look forward to your response.

All the best,
Matthew

Matthew Landauer
Founder OpenAustralia
http://www.openaustralia.org

P.S. All correspondence will be forwarded to our blog.

Posted in Development | 2 Responses

OpenAustralia has a new home on Facebook

By Matthew Landauer | Published: May 4, 2009

If you’re a user of Facebook, like what we do and want to help get more people using the site, come and visit our new home on Facebook. Become “a fan” and through the power of connections tell your friends about OpenAustralia, so that more people can become that little bit more engaged, excited and informed about politics.

Let’s see how many people we can get to join in the first week.

Posted in Announcement | Tagged | Leave a comment

Which Australian Politicians are on Twitter?

By Matthew Landauer | Published: April 30, 2009

It had been something that I’d been meaning to do for a while but hadn’t ever quite managed to find the time to do. A conversation between James Dellow (@chieftech), Senator Kate Lundy (@katelundy), Michael de Percy (@madepercy), Karl Roby (@karlroby) and Pia Waugh (@piawaugh) on Twitter a few days ago started it all going again. Time to do something about it!

Twitter, in case you haven’t seen the numerous over-excited newspaper articles, is by all measures the next “big thing” on the internet and has been undergoing a meteoric rise in popularity in Australia in the last few months.

I signed up for Twitter in November 2007 and started using it for real about a year ago. The first few weeks were definitely “what is this all about?”, “I don’t _get_ this twitter thing”, “People do talk a lot of sh*t…” and so on. Then, it started to make sense. There are a lot of very smart, interesting, engaged people out there who are chatting with each other on Twitter and the medium has brought me a great deal of intriguing little factoids, fascinating insights and, of course, a heap of new good people to talk to.

It’s really good to see that Australian politicians are starting to see the potential of Twitter. Now there are enough politicians using Twitter that bringing them together in a list makes sense.

So, please go to ozpollietweeters.pbworks.com, follow politicians and parties you’re interested in, talk to them, ask them questions and get the conversation going. Also, if you come across a politician who isn’t on the list then please add them. You’ll need to create a login on pbworks.com first, though.

You’ll notice that we’ve tried, as much as possible, to separate out the real people from the people that are impersonating them (the “fakes”). Most of the time, the fakes don’t hide it and are using the oppurtunity to parody their politician of choice. That’s fine and a very healthy part of any democracy. However, where things become tricky is where the fakes aren’t clear about who they are (or aren’t) and use the opportunity to make abusive or offensive comments. It’s not always cut and dry who people say they are on the internet and Twitter is no different in that respect.

Another purpose of bringing this list together is so that on OpenAustralia.org we can add people’s Twitter accounts to their pages.

It would be great if we could verify that each of the Twitter accounts is the real person. One thing we could do is email their official address asking them to DM a special message back, so verifying the connection between the Twitter account and their official email address.

Is this being too pedantic? Is there another simpler way we could do this? Or is this not verifying their identity clearly enough? Or, maybe we need to ask them to use a proposed simple trust mechanism? Please let me know by commenting below.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Responses

DPS, where the bloody hell are you?

By Matthew Landauer | Published: April 20, 2009

A fairly typical email exchange with the Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS), the administrators for the aph.gov.au website, goes something like this:

from: Matthew Landauer
to: webmanager@aph.gov.au
date: Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 11:39 AM
subject: Hansard 23 September 2008 probably error in division

According to the Hansard, Mark Vaile voted in a division on 23 September 2008. See
http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22chamber%2Fhansardr%2F2008-09-23%2F0060%22

However, according to his biography he resigned several months earlier on 30 July 2008. See
http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22handbook%2Fallmps%2FSU5%22

There appears to be an inconsistency between these two facts. I would guess that the Hansard is probably mistaken. Is that correct? If so, it would be great if it could be fixed.

Many thanks!

All the best,
Matthew Landauer
Founder
http://www.openaustralia.org/

It’s looking good. I receive this very quick response.

from : Web, Manager (DPS)
to: Matthew Landauer
date: Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 12:47 PM
subject: RE: Hansard 23 September 2008 probably error in division

Thanks for your email Matthew

I will get this discrepancy checked and get back to you as soon as possible.

Kind regards
Margaret

Margaret Cazabon
Parliamentary Web Manager
Department of Parliamentary Services
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600

I reply a few hours later thanking her.

More than a week passes with no further news. Hmmm… Naively I would expect that they would take this issue fairly seriously. It appears from the official Hansard record that someone has voted who wasn’t even a member of parliament at the time.

Anyway, I send the following email to follow up:

from: Matthew Landauer
to: webmanager@aph.gov.au
date: Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 1:13 PM

Any news on this?

Any possibility that OpenAustralia.org could be assigned a technical contact for the Hansard? Our software does lots of cross-checking of
the Hansard XML data and regularly finds spelling mistakes, formatting errors, logical inconsistencies and the like which I’m sure you would
like us to alert you to. However, this is currently very difficult as we have no technical contact.

It would also lighten your load as a go-between.

All the best,
Matthew

I’ve asked for an ongoing contact for OpenAustralia at the Department of Parliamentary Services before but those emails were never replied to. I wonder if I’ll hear any more this time.

Stony silence.

from: Matthew Landauer
to: webmanager@aph.gov.au
date: Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 12:37 PM

Hello, is anybody there??

So, it’s been two weeks and I’ve heard nothing more.

In the greater scheme of things it’s no big deal that a couple of emails from openaustralia.org are left unanswered. Hell, we’ve been known to not reply to all the emails we get.

The unfortunate things is this email exchange is fairly typical of all our dealings with the DPS over the last year. We’ll report a problem. If it’s something really glaring (like today’s Hansard is missing!) it will get fixed in half a day or so and I’ll receive a response to my email. If it’s something more subtle but just as important, I’ll sometimes get a response saying they’ll look into it but then I’ll never hear anything again.

Does it get relegated to the “too hard” basket?

There should be two-way communication between DPS and OpenAustralia. The DPS is providing a service to the general public by publishing the Hansard. We’re finding faults with this vital document of national importance and we don’t expect our reports of errors to be ignored.

We’re also providing a public service (entirely run by volunteers) and we have a responsibility to make it as good as it can be.

We’re providing all the results of our work (our software, our data) for free for anyone to use. We have software that we’ve written in the course of building OpenAustralia that finds many problems in the Hansard completely automatically. This software we’ve made freely available to everyone (including the DPS). However, they are apparently not interested in hearing from us.

DPS, where the bloody hell are you? We can help you. Ask us how.

Posted in Development | 5 Responses

Radio National – Future Tense: e-Australia

By Matthew Landauer | Published: February 5, 2009

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/e-australia/3181162

Posted in Media, OpenAustralia Foundation, OpenAustralia.org | Tagged , | Comments closed

eGov AU: OpenAustralia becomes first to provide the Australian Federal register of Senators’ Interests online

By Matthew Landauer | Published: January 29, 2009

http://egovau.blogspot.com.au/2009/01/openaustralia-becomes-first-to-provide.html

Posted in Media, OpenAustralia.org | Comments closed

The Register of Senators’ Interests is now online

By Matthew Landauer | Published: January 5, 2009

Today is a big milestone. We are the first website to make the Register of Senators’ Interests available online. This important public document until now has only been available to the small number of people who were able to visit the office in Canberra where the documents are held. In the Register each Senator declares information of financial interests, stocks and shares held, gifts received over a certain value, and memberships of Clubs and Associations.

The register is available on each Senator’s page. For example, have a look at the Register for Senator Judith Adams.

As soon as we can we will also make the Register of Members’ Interests available online, the equivalent document for the Representatives. Our main obstacle right now is getting our paper copy of the register scanned. If you have access to a bulk scanner and can help please contact us.

Posted in Announcement, OpenAustralia.org | 4 Responses