What do you do in your spare time during a busy, week-long conference? A) Relax B) Have a beer C) Set up new OpenAustralia sites If you’re one of our volunteers, Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell or your author, Henare Degan, you answered ‘C’ – well, OK, and a bit of ‘B’ too : ) During last [...]
Category Archives: Announcement
Launching our new website: Planning Alerts
You might have noticed we’ve been fairly quiet of late. Well, that’s because we’ve been hard at work putting together a new website called Planning Alerts which we’re launching today. Planning Alerts: Email alerts of planning applications near you We’re really excited and proud to share this with you! You’d probably know if your next [...]
Two great hackfest days!
(Cross posted to the offical Google Australia Blog) Last weekend, OpenAustralia held its second hackfest at Google’s Sydney office. If you haven’t come across OpenAustralia.org before, it’s a volunteer run website which helps you to find out what your representatives get up to in parliament with the aim of bridging the growing democratic disconnect that [...]
OpenAustralia Hackfest – MashupAustralia Edition
The OpenAustralia Foundation and Google invite you to this free all-weekend hacking extravaganza for anyone interested in creating a mashup for the MashupAustralia competition or hacking on the OpenAustralia website. Build a cool application using data from http://data.australia.gov.au, enter it into the MashupAustralia competition and and you’re in with a chance to win prizes, including [...]
The ups and downs of funding new projects
About two months ago we put in an application for funding to the auDA Foundation for a new project called “Planning Alerts”. The ideas is simple. Wouldn’t it be great if you could go to a website and put in your email address and where you live and get updates of any development applications in [...]
Melbourne's first OpenAustralia hackfest
OpenAustralia.org, Australia’s first eDemocracy website, would like to invite its friends, fans and volunteers to its first Melbourne hackfest. The first OpenAustralia hackfest, held in Sydney in June, was a big success, attracting 50 volunteers. We worked on solving existing problems as well as starting new OpenAustralia projects including a mobile version of OpenAustralia. We’re [...]
Queensland bars OpenAustralia from republishing its Hansard
In an extraordinary turn of events the Clerk of Queensland’s Parliament has refused OpenAustralia permission to republish the state’s proceedings of parliament. This is the email we received this afternoon Katherine, I have taken sometime to consider your request because of the multitude of issues and its long term policy implications. At the outset, I [...]
Announcing the OpenAustralia Foundation
From the beginning we’ve always had high hopes of getting a not-for-profit entity off the ground to ensure the continued development of the OpenAustralia website as well as provide a foundation from which we can launch cool, new, useful things for everybody. As with many things this took a little longer than expected. But finally… [...]
Inaugural OpenAustralia Hackfest Was Terrific
Last Saturday, the 13th of June, was OpenAustralia’s inaugural hackfest, bringing together developers and users of the OpenAustralia.org website. Fifty people volunteered their time and effort to help open Australia’s democracy and make it easier for Australians to keep tabs on their representatives in Parliament. The day kicked off just after midday with Matthew giving [...]
First OpenAustralia hackfest is tomorrow!
What an oversight. I’ve not blogged about our first ever OpenAustralia hackfest which is taking place in Sydney tomorrow, kindly hosted at the offices of Google Sydney. We announced it on the @openaustralia twitter feed, our development mailing list and on a couple of Linux users group mailing list and very quickly filled our capacity [...]