Category Archives: Projects

They Vote For You – What new policies would you like to see?

They Vote For You now has over one hundred policies to help us keep track of how our representatives are voting on our behalf! They range from whether to have a Royal Commission into banking to whether to legalise same-sex marriage, and you can find them all on your representative’s voting record. For example, here’s […]

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Adding your local councillors to PlanningAlerts

You may have heard that you can now use PlanningAlerts to discuss development applications with your local councillors. With over 5,000 councillors in Australia just gathering the data is a big job. We’ve already done that for about half the councils we currently cover but we need your help to collect the rest. How to […]

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

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 […]

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Ask Your Local Councillors

PlanningAlerts makes it easy to impact what happens to your local buildings, parks, streets, and infrastructure. Over the last 7 years almost 40,000 people have signed up for alerts and thousands of you have made official comments on development applications for everyone to see. But there are more ways to impact what gets built and […]

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

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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Prototyping better development notices at the OpenAustralia Hackfest

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 […]

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Our response to the ‘Electronic voting in the House of Representatives’ Report

Back in March, we submitted our views to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Procedure’s inquiry into electronic voting. And their Final Report is out now! Our submission outlined the benefits that electronic voting could bring by creating a fuller voting record, which increases accountability and transparency. Unfortunately, the Committee didn’t quite see it […]

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Rebels in the ranks? Hardly.

Members of parliamentary parties rarely cross the floor, because parties expect loyalty from their team members. … [Crossing the floor] may be seen to be giving greater preference to the needs of the electorate than the needs of the party. … A member of parliament who crosses the floor may be considered a traitor to […]

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They Vote For You and the Open Government Partnership (OGP) – Continued

Back in mid-March, we announced that They Vote For You was getting into the Open Government Partnership (OGP) action. We started by developing policies related to the Anti-Corruption Working Group: For creating a federal Anti-Corruption Commission For restricting donations to political parties We then looked at the Public Resources Working Group and came up with […]

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OpenAustralia Foundation in residence at Frontyard Projects

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 […]

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