Category Archives: Projects

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, Development, PlanningAlerts.org.au | 12 Responses

What are people contacting PlanningAlerts about?

By Joanna Hill | Published: December 7, 2022

Guest post by Service Designer and Researcher, Joanna Hill Since first launching, PlanningAlerts has grown a lot. The number of people writing to PlanningAlerts has crept up and up, as of February 2011 sending out just over 900,000 alerts (thanks Wayback Machine). By the time of writing (Dec 1 2022) PlanningAlerts has sent out a […]

Also posted in PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Senator for NSW Andrew Bragg threatens OpenAustralia Foundation with legal action

By Matthew Landauer | Published: March 23, 2022

Liberal Party Senator Andrew Bragg has stepped up his campaign against the OpenAustralia Foundation. The senator has hired high profile lawyer Rebekah Giles to threaten legal action over how the OpenAustralia Foundation website They Vote For You presents his parliamentary voting record.  They Vote For You takes the official voting record from Hansard and presents […]

Also posted in They Vote For You | 3 Responses

A new category has been added to your representative’s voting records!

By Mackay Ash | Published: January 31, 2022

You may have noticed that your MP and senator voting records are looking a bit different.  Voting records are now divided into nine different categories: Voted consistently for Voted almost always for Voted generally for Voted a mixture of for and against Voted generally against Voted almost always against Voted consistently against We can’t say […]

Also posted in Announcement, They Vote For You | 2 Responses

Productive discussions and pointed attacks

By Matthew Landauer | Published: December 3, 2021

It’s been a busy few weeks for They Vote For You. We’ve benefited from a surge in interest despite, or because of, some very pointed attacks by two MPs on the integrity and motivation of the site and the work of the OpenAustralia Foundation in general. With a renewed surge of interest from the general […]

Also posted in OpenAustralia.org, They Vote For You | Tagged | 1 Response

Putting Councillors to Bed in PlanningAlerts

By Matthew Landauer | Published: September 13, 2021

This week we’re removing councillors, and the ability to write to councillors from PlanningAlerts. We disabled the feature in 2019. Now we’re removing the functionality from the code that runs the site and as a side-effect historical comments to councillors made between 2016 and 2019 will now no longer be visible on PlanningAlerts. Why on […]

Also posted in PlanningAlerts.org.au | 2 Responses

Right to Know Pro For Journalists, Researchers, Academics, Campaigners, and FOI professionals.

By Kat Szuminska | Published: March 30, 2021

A new way to make FOI requests, for professionals Since we launched Right to Know we’ve regularly heard from journalists, who would love to use Right to Know, but need to keep Freedom of Information (FOI) requests under wraps until a story comes together. We also know it’s not only journalists who need to work […]

Also posted in Announcement, RightToKnow.org.au | Leave a comment

Thank You for All Your Comments

By Kat Szuminska | Published: January 13, 2021

Today we removed the ability for people to comment on speeches published at openaustralia.org.au We’re taking a pause on letting anyone comment on OpenAustralia because, in our work we want to make it a little easier for people who want to make a difference, to have their voices heard, for their voices to matter in […]

Also posted in Announcement, OpenAustralia.org | Leave a comment

How we deal with moderation on Right to Know

By Ben Fairless | Published: November 4, 2020

There have recently been a few articles published in The Guardian about a request on Right to Know that we were asked to moderate. As one of the volunteers who spends the most time looking after Right to Know, I wanted to explain what happened in this case and explain how we moderate requests on […]

Also posted in RightToKnow.org.au, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

The story of a tiny, almost invisible change

By Matthew Landauer | Published: September 29, 2020
Also posted in Planning, PlanningAlerts.org.au | Tagged | 1 Response