I hope everyone’s having a good start to the year, and keeping cool. If you’re in Sydney, come say hi at our Pub Meet on Tuesday evening February 28th, at the Trinity Bar on Crown St, ten minutes walk from Central. RSVP and see details here https://www.meetup.com/OpenAustralia-Foundation/events/236977994/ We’ve had a busy month since the last […]
To celebrate all our achievements in 2016, and all you great people who make them possible, we’re having a little party on Sunday the 11th of December in Sydney. We’d love to see you there! While some of the biggest contributors to OpenAustralia Foundation projects are spread across Australia, unfortunately a national tour is not […]
Most people I speak to about making Freedom of Information requests think it’s too difficult to waste time on—it’s for lawyers, not them. When I’ve seen our FOI system presented in a teaching context, the clear message is ‘FOI is too hard, too slow, and too expensive’. The message has sunk in, including with journalists, […]
Last month, the OpenAustralia Foundation ran a Hackfest, at the end of their two week-long residency at Frontyard in Marrickville. On the day, a group of us decided to take a look at the notices posted at properties with proposed development applications. You’ll have seen them before: they’re often bright green, tied to fences, and […]
A photo posted by FRONTYARD (@frontyardorg) on Mar 16, 2016 at 5:07am PDT A few weeks ago my partner Lisa and I were checking out the Marrickville Open Studio Trail (MOST). MOST is a wonderful initiative organised by my local council, Marrickville Council, where over 50 local studios and galleries have open days over the […]
Earlier this month we ran our first Introduction to Web Scraping Workshop and it was a big success! We had 6 wonderful attendees. By the afternoon everyone had written a scraper to collect data from the web. You can read more about how it went on information graphics designer Kelly Tall’s blog. We’re looking forward […]
Web scraping is a flexible and powerful technique to collect data for your projects. You can use a scraper to quickly grab all kinds of information for analysis and processing. Scrapers are the backbone of our projects such as They Vote For You and PlanningAlerts— we’re always finding new ways that scrapers can help. There’s […]
Another 2 million people in Australia now have a simple way to impact development in their local area. Last month the OpenAustralia Foundation teamed up with a group of volunteer engineers from Google and have expanded the availability of our project PlanningAlerts to 21 more local council areas. The event was part of the GoogleServe […]
Last night, about 10 of us got together in Sydney for a fun night of scraping and learning about morph.io. I organised the get together because I’m just really excited about writing scrapers and using data from morph.io at the moment. I’ve only been writing scrapers for the last few months as Matthew and I […]
A fortnight ago I had the privilege of attending AlaveteliCon 2015 in Madrid. It’s the conference about online Freedom of Information (FOI) technologies named after Alaveteli, the open source software that runs Right To Know. Looking back it was a huge two days packed with sessions on every important aspect of running FOI request sites. […]
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