Photo by stevendepolo on Flickr (cc by 2.0) Australia has only 5 months to define ambitious open government reforms for its first Open Government Partnership (OGP) National Action Plan. In this time we must gather raw ideas, research, discuss and deliberate them into fully developed, budgeted, and agreed commitments. In July the government must announce […]
I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer. – Abraham Lincoln When the Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Bill 2015 went through the House of Representatives, it passed […]
Calling all law students and political science enthusiasts! This summer, the OpenAustralia Foundation invites you to put your statutory interpretation skills to work! If you can pick through the Parliamentary jargon and make it clear who’s voting for what from a day’s proceedings then you can help. They Vote For You launched last year to […]
Since it launched last year, we’ve received a few emails from the offices of Members or Senators that ask us to change their voting record on They Vote For You in some way because they think it’s inaccurate. But when we ask them to tell us what the error is, we don’t hear back from […]
Forget what politicians say. What truly matters is what they do. And what they do is vote, to write our laws which affect us all. — They Vote For You Australia got a new Prime Minister last week. As the media detailed the step by step drama, tens of thousands of people visited and shared […]
Keeping They Vote For You up to date can seem a little challenging. So, I’ve prioritised the three most important jobs to make it easier for people to get involved. If these three tasks are done regularly by enough people, the site will remain tickety boo (which is urban slang for ‘useful and current’). 1. […]
On Saturday Luke and I were really glad to be invited on FBi radio’s excellent Backchat programme. You can listen to the podcast here: Thanks for having us, FBi!
For the last three and a half months I’ve been working with the OpenAustralia Foundation to design their latest project, They Vote For You. For me, as always, this was a broad interpretation of the role “designer”: digging into functionality, language, information architecture, appearance, feeling, right down to the purpose and direction of the site. […]
OpenAustralia.org is ancient by internet standards. When it was created 7 years ago Twitter had just launched. There was no Instagram. Or GitHub. After all this time it keeps chugging along, still making our Parliament more accessible and understandable. Today is a rare and happy day when we add something new to the venerable site. […]
There are many ways to edit division summaries. Here, I’m going to explain an approach that’s worked well for me. Choose a division First, I choose a division to summarise. I like to choose divisions that are relevant to policies that I’ve created, such as For decreasing availability of welfare payments. This means I often […]
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