Category Archives: PlanningAlerts.org.au

The increase of Yimbyism on Planning Alerts

Australia’s most recent housing turf war has found its way into the comments section of Planning Alerts. A look into the Yimby movement and its presence on the site. 

In 2024, we observed a new trend on our site. Users supporting individual Development Alerts were commenting not only how a particular application would benefit their local area, but also….

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Introducing the biggest Planning Alerts redesign in fourteen years

We originally launched Planning Alerts in October 2009. That feels like a lifetime ago. In that time all sorts of features have been added, there have been visual redesigns, and we’ve introduced many little improvements and fixes. Yet nothing we have done before feels as substantial and meaningful as what we’re launching today.  On the […]

Also posted in Announcement | 2 Responses

Journey to Improving Planning Alerts: A Service Designer’s Perspective – Part 3 Toolkit for Service Improvement

Guest post by Service Designer and Researcher, Sabina Popin This blog post is the grand finale in our three-part series on the recent Planning Alerts Service Improvement project. I kicked off the series with a bird’s eye view of the project, and the sequel dove deeper into the approach, research, insights, opportunities, and concepts. Now, […]

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Journey to Improving Planning Alerts: A Service Designer’s Perspective – Part 2 Research, Testing and Insights

Guest post by Service Designer and Researcher, Sabina Popin This post is part of a three part series about the recent project on Planning Alerts Service Improvement. In the previous post I outlined the entirety of the project in brief. In this post you get to read in more depth about the epic journey we’ve […]

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Journey to Improving Planning Alerts: A Service Designer’s Perspective

Guest post by Service Designer and Researcher, Sabina Popin Welcome to the journey of improving Planning Alerts! The OpenAustralia Foundation is a tiny organisation that gets a lot of email! Thousands of emails a year are directly in relation to the Planning Alerts service, people who use the service reaching out asking for all kinds […]

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New! Three easy steps to a better PlanningAlerts

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 | 12 Responses

What are people contacting PlanningAlerts about?

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 […]

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Putting Councillors to Bed in PlanningAlerts

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 […]

Posted in PlanningAlerts.org.au | 2 Responses

The story of a tiny, almost invisible change

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My Outreachy Internship with Open Australia Foundation

Cross-posted from Hisayo Horie’s blog, our wonderful Outreachy intern for the last 3 months. Officially I finished my internship with Open Australia Foundation, and I already miss working with OAF so much. I learned so much about programing and development, as well as community centred technology, challenges, and most importantly where I stand and where […]

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