Category Archives: Uncategorized

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

By Sabina Popin | Published: May 26, 2023

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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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 […]

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Last week in Parliament

By Mackay Ash | Published: April 17, 2020

You may have been reading about the unsuccessful amendments to the Coronavirus Economic Response Package that opposition MPs and Senators attempted to pass last week. The amendments related to expanding the Government’s JobKeeper payment to include more workers, such as casual workers, workers with major charities and working-visa holders who are still in the country. […]

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Coronavirus and our Federal Parliament

By Mackay Ash | Published: March 20, 2020

Our federal parliament is scheduled to sit next week but, due to the Coronavirus pandemic, it’s going to look a bit different. On Wednesday, the Prime Minister released a media release explaining the type of changes we should expect. In a nut shell, our parliament is battening down the hatches and reducing its business to […]

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OpenAustralia Foundation and the Open Government Partnership Experience

By Kat Szuminska | Published: March 8, 2017

Back in 2013 I tagged along invited myself to the Open Government Summit. At the time, I expected that Australia would officially announce we were joining the Open Government Partnership. At this summit in London, thousands of people from Civil Society and Government were working together on making life better for people in their countries. The opening plenary session […]

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At the Edges of Art, Technology and Democracy

By Alexandra Crosby | Published: June 7, 2016

This is a guest post by the fantastic Alexandra Crosby, co-founder of Fontyard in Marrickville. Alexandra joined us at our recent Hackfest at their space and made thoughtful contributions to the group redesigning street development application notices. The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, […]

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Unlocking Australia’s public data: A catch up with Rosie Williams

By Luke Bacon | Published: February 19, 2015

Rosie Williams has independently made a huge contributions to budget transparency and the accessibility of public data in Australia through her project InfoAus. It’s been a while since we were able to catch up at the last pub meet so I sent through a few questions.   What are you working on at the moment? and what was the […]

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Visualising the Society and the Personal

By Matthew Landauer | Published: August 10, 2012

I just finished watching Hans Rosling’s documentary for the BBC “The Joy of Stats”. Hans Rosling is the ebullient swedish professor who came to widespread public recognition through his passionate TED talks where he used statistics to unravel and debunk many widespread myths and misunderstandings about world health and the third world. The documentary “The Joy […]

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

By Matthew Landauer | Published: September 9, 2009

One Sunday morning, a bit over two weeks ago, Kat, busy putting the finishing touches to her article on transparency for the Centre for Policy Development‘s group submission to the government 2.0 taskforce “Upgrading Democracy” leans over to me and says: “How about we submit a Perl app to the taskforce as an essay in […]

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What is the OpenAustralia Foundation?

By Matthew Landauer | Published: September 3, 2009

As we promised earlier, we’ve now put the constitution online of our newly formed charity. This document describes in gory detail the rules of operation of the charity. Probably the most important part and certainly the most interesting are the “objects” which describe the big-picture guiding principles for the foundation’s actions. We worked with our […]

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