A couple of weeks ago we had our third planning session for 2016. These quarterly planning sessions allow us to reflect on the work we’ve been doing and make any adjustments we need during the year. This post is a little update on what we discussed and what we’ll be working on from July through […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A few weeks ago we had our second planning session of 2016. As we mentioned in our last planning update we needed to have our usual quarterly review but we also needed to finalise our overall plan for the year. It was a really tough day. Whittling down the huge laundry list of things we […]
In June last year a development application was submitted to demolish the Alexandria Hotel, an old pub in inner-Sydney, and replace it with a new apartment block. Hundreds of people in the local community opposed the loss of this historic building and over a quarter of those people used PlanningAlerts [PDF] to have their say. […]
Another 2 million people in Australia now have a simple way to impact development in their local area. Last month the OpenAustralia Foundation teamed up with a group of volunteer engineers from Google and have expanded the availability of our project PlanningAlerts to 21 more local council areas. The event was part of the GoogleServe […]
Starting today, we’re beginning to roll out a change to the way the PlanningAlerts API works. We’re introducing API keys for all users of the API from low-volume non-commercial users to high-volume commercial users. We are making this change so that we can better measure and understand the way people are using the API as […]
Cross-posted on the Official Google Australia Blog. A couple of weeks ago we at the OpenAustralia Foundation – Australia’s open data, open government and civic hacking charity – asked if anyone wanted to join three of our volunteers at Google Sydney for a hackfest. The request was deliberately casual as we just wanted have a […]
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Who comments in PlanningAlerts and how could it work better?
In our last two quarterly planning posts (see Q3 2015 and Q4 2015), we’ve talked about helping people write to their elected local councillors about planning applications through PlanningAlerts. As Matthew wrote in June, “The aim is to strengthen the connection between citizens and local councillors around one of the most important things that local […]