Category Archives: Projects

A long overdue tech update about Australia’s first ever parliamentary vote tracker

Photo of working on the project

Back in July last year Matthew told you that we’d started work on a new project and it’s high time for an update on the progress of that project. I want to share with you what we’ve been doing, where we’re at right now, and some exciting new development that we’re undertaking before we launch […]

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Morph: Announcing A New Scraping Platform

Web scrapers could be called the unsung heroes of data liberation. They invisibly power so many websites including real estate search sites, product comparison sites and the ever familiar Google search engine. Scraping is where you run a program to extract structured data from web pages. Web scraping powers PlanningAlerts, which allows you to find […]

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Easier collaboration for OpenAustralia Foundation projects

It should be simple for anyone to get involved in helping create an OpenAustralia Foundation project. After all, that’s what our projects seek to do to our democracy – make it really easy to get involved. Today we’ve made a solid step in that direction. We’ve moved our entire issue tracking system to GitHub Issues. […]

Also posted in Development, ElectionLeaflets.org.au, OpenAustralia Foundation, OpenAustralia.org, PlanningAlerts.org.au, RightToKnow.org.au | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

This Is Not An Election Leaflet – 2013 Federal Election Edition

This year, like we did during the 2010 Federal Election, we have made an election leaflet which is not an election leaflet. We’ll be sending these out to let people know about ElectionLeaflets.org.au and encourage them to upload the election leaflets they receive in the mail to the site. Every election leaflet uploaded helps make […]

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Candidates Can’t Hide – Now Anyone Can Monitor the Federal Election

Today we’re proud to announce the launch of the OpenAustralia Foundation’s live election monitoring tool – Election Leaflets – for the forthcoming 2013 federal election. As we all know, the Prime Minister has announced that the next election will be held on the 14th of September. We’re already neck deep in an unprecedentedly long election […]

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What’s the latest with RightToKnow?

Right To Know was launched at the end of last year and through the quietest part of the year when people are enjoying the fine weather and some well-earned free time people have already put in over fifty freedom of information requests. That’s pretty amazing. Requests have been diverse, including for information about thing like: […]

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Western Australians – Make a difference before you vote

Screenshot of SMH article on ElectionLeaflets.org.au

In less than 3 months, over 1.3 million Western Australians will head to the polls to decide their state government for the next 4 years. Voters will soon be bombarded by advertising on TV, radio, billboards and online – that is if it hasn’t already started. But what about those largely hidden weapons in the […]

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Federal Senate congratulates the OpenAustralia Foundation for its ‘Right to Know’ initiative

Earlier today a motion was presented to the Senate which notes the creation of the Freedom of Information request site Right To Know we launched yesterday and which urges the government to, “use the site, provide feedback, and support the Foundation in its aim of encouraging effective citizen access to government information.” We are very […]

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Why we think that Freedom of Information should be easy

In the lead up to the launch of Right To Know, we organised an all weekend Hack[s]fest event for which we asked journalists, activists and software developers interested in Freedom of Information to come along and work together for the final push. As if writing software and making freedom of information requests wasn’t enough, volunteer […]

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You have the Right To Know

Whether you are an octogenarian human rights activist, a working mother, a twenty something surfer or still at school, the government undoubtedly has information that is useful to you and many people like you who share your interests. But am I allowed to access it? Yes! 30 years ago Australia enacted a law which changed […]

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