Digital Library Services for Democracy

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 help us to make this thing so good it can’t possibly be ignored.

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 of times different representatives used a particular phrase and see the most recent speeches by a particular representative. These are just some of the things you can do with the search feature.
• Ministerial information – we’ve added all the ministerial positions of representatives and senators back to the beginning of the Howard government. When a minister speaks, their their job title is right next to their photo. Also, on each representative’s page you see all their ministerial appointments, current and past.
• Postcode lookup – On the front page you can enter your postcode and it will tell you who your representative is and remember that for the next time you come back to the site.

There have also been lots of little fixes. If you want to follow the software development in detail go to software.openaustralia.org.

Hurrah, an official response from the Department of Parliamentary Services on our request to republish the Hansard.

“You don’t require permission to reproduce Hansard extracts and from your recent email […] additionally I can confirm that your citing of the Hansard source is appropriate.”

One small step for OpenAustralia, and one not insubstantial leap for democratic transparency in Australia.

To everyone involved getting us this far, thank you! We have your words, and now we are going after your pictures.

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 the Hansard but the entire contents of www.aph.gov.au, the Parliament of Australia’s website.

After a process of being directed to several different departments we recently were informed that our request is now being seriously considered by all three Parliamentary departments that support the working of Parliament, the Department of the Senate, the Department of the House of Representatives and the Department of Parliamentary Services.

The topic of discussion at this stage is focused on how each government department’s information is cited which is completely reasonable. Also, in every speech that is shown in our application there is a link that goes directly to the original Hansard source on the Parliament of Australia website.

With a bit of luck we should obtain permission soon.

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 of the site.

We want OpenAustralia to be useful to political organisations, whatever their interests or persuasions, as well as being useful to individuals who want to know a little more about what their representatives are doing in parliament.

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 to use this code as a starting point for our own Australian version.Our code, in its current infantile state, can be checked out from our subversion repository:

svn co https://twfy-australia.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/twfy-australia twfy-australia

We also have a mailing list for discussions about what we’re doing both technical and non-technical in nature. If you’re interested, please do sign up or read through the archives.To see all the commits to the code as they happen sign up to the commits email list.

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 a large number of unspeakable hacky sins to get here but it’s progress!