Category Archives: Development

New! Three easy steps to a better PlanningAlerts

By Matthew Landauer | Published: December 20, 2022

Do you use PlanningAlerts and have an email alert set up? Do you realise you’ve never set a password for an account? Have you ever found unsubscribing from an alert not entirely obvious or needed help to confirm a comment or update your email address for an alert? Good news! From now on you’ll be […]

Also posted in Announcement, PlanningAlerts.org.au | 12 Responses

My Outreachy Internship with Open Australia Foundation

By Hisayo Horie | Published: October 16, 2017

Cross-posted from Hisayo Horie’s blog, our wonderful Outreachy intern for the last 3 months. Officially I finished my internship with Open Australia Foundation, and I already miss working with OAF so much. I learned so much about programing and development, as well as community centred technology, challenges, and most importantly where I stand and where […]

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Making your emails faster and more secure

By Henare Degan | Published: March 13, 2017

Last week we made a couple of changes that make your PlanningAlerts emails more responsive and a bit more secure. They’re great examples of the kind of improvements we’d usually struggle to find to the time for, were it not for our maintenance-focussed start to the year. When you sign up for an alert or […]

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Matthew’s back: Improving the stability and scalability of the morph.io platform

By Matthew Landauer | Published: July 7, 2016

I’m very happy to be back at the Foundation for a little stint now to get my hands dirty on some coding, something I haven’t had any opportunity to do over the last year. It’s funny how you can miss these things! As you might have noticed, I’ve been away from working on morph.io and […]

Also posted in Announcement, Morph | 1 Response

Picking a focus for the final push on our current major project

By Luke Bacon | Published: June 13, 2016

A couple of weeks ago Kat and I spent some time working out how best to spend the remaining time on our latest major project: helping people impact local planning by making it easy for them to write to their local councillors through PlanningAlerts. I thought it would be useful for our team, and anyone […]

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A better Right To Know on your phone

By Luke Bacon | Published: April 2, 2015

One in four people who visit Right To Know use a mobile device to do so. Unfortunately the site hasn’t been designed for them. They’ve been forced to zoom in on the page designed for desktop users. This made it hard to navigate, quickly understand what a page is about, and request information. When traffic […]

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Designing They Vote For You

By Luke Bacon | Published: December 8, 2014

For the last three and a half months I’ve been working with the OpenAustralia Foundation to design their latest project, They Vote For You. For me, as always, this was a broad interpretation of the role “designer”: digging into functionality, language, information architecture, appearance, feeling, right down to the purpose and direction of the site. […]

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How your MP votes, now on OpenAustralia.org

By Henare Degan | Published: December 3, 2014

OpenAustralia.org is ancient by internet standards. When it was created 7 years ago Twitter had just launched. There was no Instagram. Or GitHub. After all this time it keeps chugging along, still making our Parliament more accessible and understandable. Today is a rare and happy day when we add something new to the venerable site. […]

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Keep an eye on the policies that matter to you

By Henare Degan | Published: December 1, 2014

Believe it or not there is no easy to understand explanation of every vote in our Federal Parliament. That’s why They Vote For You relies on the hard work of people like you to summarise votes and research Policies so that we can all better understand how our MPs are voting on our behalf. Largely […]

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