Read an interview with me by Maxine from WebDirections about OpenAustralia and some of the many ideas we have for its future.
WebDirections runs a host of conferences in the area of web development.
I’m a little late as this was over two weeks ago but hey, better later than never.
Are you a lawyer? Can you offer us advice about setting up a legal entity and charitable tax status for OpenAustralia?
Setting up a charity under the correct legal status is a complicated business in Australia. We need help. We’re not lawyers ourselves and we want to do this right. OpenAustralia is strictly a non-partisan information service and is no shape or form political but we want to make sure that we dot our i’s and cross our t’s when it comes to our legal status.
So far we’ve contacted the Public Interest Law Clearing House (PILCH) NSW and a lawyer from Freehills but have received no concrete reply.
So, if you’re a lawyer or you know a lawyer that could help us and has experience in this area please point them at this blog post or contact us.
A copy of the Register of Members’ Interests for the House of Representatives has quite literarily arrived on our doorstep! We can now begin the task of scanning and transcribing. Please contact us at contact@openaustralia.org if you want to help with the transcribing. If we get enough people this won’t be too big a task.
We won’t put the result online until the committee that looks after the Register has met and discussed what we’re doing. This won’t happen until the end of August when the House of Representatives is back from recess. That gives us plenty of time to get on with the job.
We’ve blogged about this several times before: “The Register of Members’ Interests is not available online“; “Register of Members’ Interests update“; “I’ve got it written down here on a piece of paper“; “The register is on its way“.
Let the fun begin.
A copy of the Register of Members’ Interests for the House of Representatives has quite literarily arrived on our doorstep! We can now begin the task of scanning and transcribing. Please contact us at contact@openaustralia.org if you want to help with the transcribing. If we get enough people this won’t be too big a task.
We won’t put the result online until the committee that looks after the Register has met and discussed what we’re doing. This won’t happen until the end of August when the House of Representatives is back from recess. That gives us plenty of time to get on with the job.
We’ve blogged about this several times before: “The Register of Members’ Interests is not available online“; “Register of Members’ Interests update“; “I’ve got it written down here on a piece of paper“; “The register is on its way“.
Let the fun begin.
It’s only been live for a few weeks but already OpenAustralia has received great coverage and publicity from the online community.
Here are some links to articles and blog posts about OpenAustralia:
… plus more.
Thanks everyone for promoting, discussing and providing feedback on OpenAustralia. Also make sure you follow us on Twitter at @OpenAustralia.
It’s only been live for a few weeks but already OpenAustralia has received great coverage and publicity from the online community.
Here are some links to articles and blog posts about OpenAustralia:
… plus more.
Thanks everyone for promoting, discussing and providing feedback on OpenAustralia. Also make sure you follow us on Twitter at @OpenAustralia.
The sample volume of the Register of Members’ Interests is in many ways a mundane looking tome. Representatives’ entries look like forms any one of us might fill in. Some standard and diligent, no doubt from years of filling in the same forms with exactly the information requested in the headings, others’ perhaps overly detailed. Cover letters volunteering information absolutely not requested when Members feel they should do so. Typically, we see shares, names of banks mortgages are with, homes, and cars, along with membership of clubs and associations. However, there are no amounts specified in the pecuniary interests stated. Its only possible to infer from some of the headings where there is a requirement to register items over a certain figure. eg. Gifts worth over $750.
The Committee of Privileges and Members’ Interests was not able to discuss our republishing of the Register of Members’ Interests online last week. It is not expected to meet again until August when Parliamentary sittings resume. In the meantime, the Registrar for the Committee of Privileges and Members’ Interests is arranging to send the full Register of Members’ Interests to OpenAustralia. We’ll then transcribe these entries, many of which (at least in the sample volume) are forms filled in by hand. The pages are however sparsely filled which makes the whole enterprise look much more manageable. The first step will be digitizing all the pages, which we’re hoping will involve a friendly neighbourhood bulk scanner. Step two may be a couple of passes, typed entries we hope will run through some OCR software, and then we may well be asking for some volunteers to help with the handwritten entries. Look out for an update soon!
About a week ago, shortly after the public launch of OpenAustralia, we were contacted by Richard Allan, who has been involved with TheyWorkForYou over a number of years. He used to be a UK Member of Parliament with a strong interest in technology issues.
While he was an MP, he even wrote the first version of the email alerts system for TheyWorkForYou.
He now works for Cisco UK in the area of technology policy issues. He has a lot of dealings with European governments in the area of telecoms legislation and the like.
He also chairs a UK Task Force called Power of Information which was established by the Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson MP in March 2008 which is about opening up government information in all of its various forms.
In a very nice coincidence he was coming on a visit to Australia to speak at a conference in Brisbane and meet politicians and government officials in Sydney and Canberra.
Yesterday night he took time out from his busy schedule to meet Kat and myself for dinner in Sydney. We talked about a lot of things including his dealings with people from MySociety, his plans for telling people about OpenAustralia and his work with Cisco and the Power of Information Task Force.
OpenAustralia is a good example of what is possible by opening up information. Because the Parliament website publishes the Hansard daily online we can take that and effectively repackage it into something that is more engaging and more oriented to how actually people want to read and interact with this information.
For his meetings with Australian government officials and politicians next week he can now use OpenAustralia.org as a case study to show what people, just ordinary, but technologically capable people, can build on their own without waiting for the government to do it for them.
We had a really interesting conversation over dinner with Richard. We certainly learned a great deal. We also hope that he will be one of the many people to help OpenAustralia grow and become more popular over the coming months and years.
About a week ago, shortly after the public launch of OpenAustralia, we were contacted by Richard Allan, who has been involved with TheyWorkForYou over a number of years. He used to be a UK Member of Parliament with a strong interest in technology issues.
While he was an MP, he even wrote the first version of the email alerts system for TheyWorkForYou.
He now works for Cisco UK in the area of technology policy issues. He has a lot of dealings with European governments in the area of telecoms legislation and the like.
He also chairs a UK Task Force called Power of Information which was established by the Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson MP in March 2008 which is about opening up government information in all of its various forms.
In a very nice coincidence he was coming on a visit to Australia to speak at a conference in Brisbane and meet politicians and government officials in Sydney and Canberra.
Yesterday night he took time out from his busy schedule to meet Kat and myself for dinner in Sydney. We talked about a lot of things including his dealings with people from MySociety, his plans for telling people about OpenAustralia and his work with Cisco and the Power of Information Task Force.
OpenAustralia is a good example of what is possible by opening up information. Because the Parliament website publishes the Hansard daily online we can take that and effectively repackage it into something that is more engaging and more oriented to how actually people want to read and interact with this information.
For his meetings with Australian government officials and politicians next week he can now use OpenAustralia.org as a case study to show what people, just ordinary, but technologically capable people, can build on their own without waiting for the government to do it for them.
We had a really interesting conversation over dinner with Richard. We certainly learned a great deal. We also hope that he will be one of the many people to help OpenAustralia grow and become more popular over the coming months and years.
It’s now been just under a week since we launched OpenAustralia to the wide world. The response has been overwhelming considering just how little we did to let people know about it. You might have noticed that we’ve seemed a little quiet in the last week (i.e. no new blog posts until today) but that’s just because we’ve been trying to keep up with the messages coming our way.
So, if we haven’t gotten back to you please be patient we’ll get to you soon!
Thank you everyone for your very kind words of congratulations and support. It means a lot to us.
This is just the beginning – so expect to see a lot of new and exciting things to come.
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