Category Archives: Development

As you may know, the Register of Members’ Interests says who or what organisations are paying what to members of the House of Representatives. This is a really important document that explains who is financially influencing your Representatives. For this reason, we obviously want to include this information in OpenAustralia. This is what happened when […]

Yesterday we had a meeting at the ABC about their forthcoming show, Q&A – “Adventures in Democracy”. It brings a live studio audience together with politicians and gives ordinary people the opportunity to ask questions directly to their representatives. It sounds dry, but it definitely isn’t! The first show is next Thursday (22nd May) at […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]