Not secret at all…

Just a really quick one to let you all know. I’ve been invited to attend, representing the OpenAustralia Foundation, a study group meeting of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and Commonwealth representatives of the OpeningParliament.org community. This will be taking place next week in London, UK.

The aim of the study group is to “review and update the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association’s Recommended Benchmarks for Democratic Legislatures. Discussions will focus on the needs for increased parliamentary openness and strong benchmarks for individual parliamentary conduct, ethics and behaviour, in order to strengthen the ability of parliaments to represent citizens in a tech-empowered world.”

I look forward to meeting the other participants, members of parliament and representatives of parliamentary monitoring organisations from across the commonwealth including from NSW, the Hon Jenny Gardiner, MLC, deputy leader of the Nationals in the legislative council.

This is a long way to travel for a two and a half day meeting. So, I am taking the opportunity and extending my trip by a week to work with some of our mySociety colleagues and also take in a one day informal technology conference, OpenTech 2013. OpenTech 2013 is a descendant of a one day technology conference in 2004 which had a big influence on my life, NotCon.

Notcon 2004 is the conference that started it all for me personally. It is where Kat Szuminska and I saw the unveiling of TheyWorkForYou.com from the group that ultimately became mySociety.

Thank you to the National Democratic Institute and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association for inviting me and thanks to the World Bank Institute for sponsoring my flight and NDI for covering my accommodation during the meeting.

As we all know, the Prime Minister has announced that the next election will be held on the 14th of September. We’re already neck deep in an unprecedentedly long election campaign and that means even more opportunities for dirt tricks and skullduggery on the campaign trail.

We need your help to keep an eye on the candidates by uploading all sorts of election material to ElectionLeaflets.org.au: leaflets, flyers, letters, posters, Internet ads – it’s all valuable material to track.

Take a photo or screenshot and either upload it directly to the site or email it to leaflet@electionleaflets.org.au

Don’t let the politicians have all the fun – make a positive difference before you vote. Start uploading leaflets now!

Requests have been diverse, including for information about thing like:

• Uranium Sales To India
• Source code for Cybersafety Help Button software
• List of Australian businesses compromised in $30m Romanian credit card fraud

A number of interesting articles and posts relating to Freedom of Information that you can see for yourself in full on Right To Know:

• http://www.geordieguy.com/2012/12/dbcdes-cybersafety-help-button-was-rejected-because-its-a-100000-link/
• http://foi-privacy.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/foi-classic-voluminous-and-complex.html?m=1
• http://delimiter.com.au/2013/01/24/foi-request-targets-nbn-rollout-stats/

Right To Know is all about what you want to know. That’s why if you have a burning question or you read or saw something on the news that the government might know something about you should consider putting in a Freedom of Information request. Right To Know makes that straightforward. Start here.

Want to help run the site? There’s a bunch of small but significant on-going tasks required to maintain and run the site. Things like hiding requests that contain private information, answering queries from people via email, talking to agencies who have questions about Right To Know.

It’s fun, you learn a lot and it’s really rewarding. You don’t have to be technical to do this stuff, just willing to learn.

Get in touch if you’re interested.

Right now, with Right To Know you can make requests to Federal government. We’d like to extend this as soon as possible to cover state and local governments as well.

We were hoping to get started on this at the beginning of this year but another big job has delayed us (more on this later).

You can help and make this happen soon!

For each state you can help by collecting a list of agencies with contact email addresses where they can receive freedom of information requests. Also you can help by updating the help on the site with advice that’s relevant to the state. http://www.righttoknow.org.au/help/requesting Don’t worry about how the text on the site itself gets updated start by writing the text in a word processing program or using Google docs – whatever it is that you find easiest. Then, get in touch!

Before the public release of RightToKnow we came to an agreement with mySociety, the UK charity behind the software that underpins Right To Know, that we would work together on a major upgrade to the software in an effort to make it easier for new contributors to the codebase.

This involves upgrading the software, Alaveteli, from Rails 2 to Rails 3. This is a really big job, with little noticeable difference to the user but one that is essential to keep the codebase current, relevant and maintainable.

We agreed to split the costs of this work 50/50 with the total job estimated to take 6 weeks.

We had hoped to get started on this before the end of the year. We committed to the work. However, the release of Right To Know ended up taking up more technical effort than we expected and so we pushed back the bulk of the Rails upgrade work to the beginning of this year.

With Alaveteli being an open-source project, everyone in the world who uses it will benefit from this work. It’s a great feeling to know that the fruits of your work will live on and benefit people both directly and indirectly.

If you’re a developer and you’ve never worked on an open source project I really suggest you give it a try. You won’t regret it.

Henare has made great progress leading the effort of the Rails upgrade. I’ve pitched in too.

A big thank you also to Louise, the awesome developer from mySociety that we’ve been working with.

We’re on track for finishing in the expected time and the codebase for Alaveteli, which is a surprisingly complicated beast, will be in a better state for everyone in the world to make use of.

You can watch our progress on the Rails upgrade on github

https://github.com/openaustralia/alaveteli/tree/rails-3-spike

and see some of the work that we’ve already back-ported and has been merged upstream

https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli

But what about those largely hidden weapons in the fight for your vote – election leaflets. They’re very effective, highly targeted and sometimes deeply bitter. Normally they’re slipped in your mailbox only to be promptly tossed into the recycling bin. What if you could use those to monitor the promises, and sometimes dirty tricks, of the people vying for your vote?

That’s precisely what our Election Leaflets project allows everyone to do but it needs volunteers and supporters to help run it.

The great news is that a civic-minded WA citizen has stepped up to carry out the technical work required to set up the site! This means we can monitor the WA election.

The most important thing to make the project successful will be getting the word out and we’re now searching for other locals interested in lending a hand. Are you from WA or know someone there? Do you want to make a difference before you vote?

Then get in touch to find out more: contact@electionleaflets.org.au

Earlier today a motion was presented to the Senate which notes the creation of the Freedom of Information request site Right To Know we launched yesterday and which urges the government to, “use the site, provide feedback, and support the Foundation in its aim of encouraging effective citizen access to government information.”

We are very pleased to see that the motion was agreed to and we thank the Senators.

We were however surprised to hear that the government indicated that it did not support the motion and we were even more surprised to find that the reason was what someone else said about the site in the media. We think this is a simple misunderstanding.

The aim of Right To Know is to make it easy for everyone to make Freedom of Information requests which are in the public interest. It is based on the well established model of the UK project WhatDoTheyKnow.com created by mySociety, which has been operating for more than 5 years and now accounts for 15-20% of all FOI requests made in the UK.

We genuinely believe that over time, Right To Know has the potential to help government agencies as well as citizens. By teaching people how to put in more targeted, effective requests they become easier and cheaper to fulfil. Publishing all requests made via the site in a discoverable, searchable form reduces the cost and effort of duplicate requests.

As Craig Thomler, Government 2.0 expert, said yesterday, “I’m hopeful that the government and public service will look on the launch of Right to Know as a positive step that supports the goals of FOI…”

We think they are – we’ve been delighted by some super-helpful agency responses already.

Because the site also opens up the trail of correspondence between the requester and the agency, again, over time we expect we’ll see patterns emerge both in the kinds of requests being made, as well as the sorts of responses and outcomes they achieve. This new wealth of information, which is not currently available, will allow everyone to assess what is working and not about the Freedom of Information system.

Right To Know will help more people participate in this important part of our democracy. As Peter Timmins, FOI lawyer and consultant, said, “…use of the FOI act for accountability or participation in government purposes at the national level is pathetically low. Right to Know may change this by removing some of the mystique.”

The more we find out about how government works, the better able we are to make suggestions to improve the things that are done badly, and to celebrate the things that are done well. Find out more at Right To Know.

Thanks to aph.gov.au for use of their photograph of the Senate (CC Licensed)

Updated to link to the OpenAustralia.org Senate motion.

As if writing software and making freedom of information requests wasn’t enough, volunteer Mikey Leung asked us to spill the beans on why we thought building Right To Know was important. Here’s the short video he made.

We hope it answers that question.

Whether you are an octogenarian human rights activist, a working mother, a twenty something surfer or still at school, the government undoubtedly has information that is useful to you and many people like you who share your interests.

But am I allowed to access it?

Yes!

30 years ago Australia enacted a law which changed everything, the Freedom of Information Act 1982 which gave everyone the right to access government documents. Behind the scenes it took the passion and dedication of politicians, public servants and activists more than ten years to make this happen and we became one of the first countries to enshrine these rights of access in law. This is absolutely something to celebrate!

If you wanted to ask the government for information in the past it could be hard to know where to start.

Today that all changes.

That’s because today we’d like to introduce you to Right To Know.

With Right To Know we’ve made it simple for you to ask the government for information you think is important. On the site you’ll find really easy to understand instructions every step of the way, and there are people there who can help.

You can also see how other people have worded their requests and see what information they received.

You can visit it right now at

RightToKnow.org.au

A huge thank you to all the people who helped to make this happen over the last few months.

Go ahead ask for information. It’s your right to know.

We’ve run hackfests in the past but this will be our first Hack[s]fest! This time we not only inviting hackers to get involved with the technical aspects of the project, we’re also inviting hacks, activists, FOI gurus and anyone else that’s interested in learning more or getting involved with this exciting new project.

By getting everyone together for a weekend we’ll all learn more, make the project better and start putting in some FOI requests so register now to come on Saturday the 17th of November to Google Sydney (and again on Sunday if you’re keen!).

Our rough schedule is as follows:

Saturday
10:30 – Doors open
11:00 – Introduction and talk(s)
12:00 – Lunch, chat and meet people to work with
13:00 – People have eaten and found something and someone to work with
17:00 – Pack up and go for a drink somewhere
Sunday
11:00 – Doors open and hacking starts
12:00 – Lunch
15:00 – Show and tell
16:00 – Pack up and go for a drink somewhere

Register now and if you have any questions, leave a comment or email us.

Recently, an international initiative by a large number of our fellow Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations, the Declaration of Parliamentary Openness, was announced. This lays out principles which we all hope Parliaments can follow. They are simple principles that make Parliaments more accessible and accountable to the very people that they are representing.

When news of the announcement came, we were rather pleased to see that Penny Sharpe, the NSW Shadow Minister for Transport, made a speech in parliament on the declaration noting it’s relevance here. She appears to have been the first Parliamentarian to have mentioned the declaration in a Parliament anywhere in the world. We love our world firsts!

She then took the next step of writing to Greg Pearce, who’s the Minister for Finance and Services and Don Harwin, the President of the Legislative Council asking directly for their support in helping us make the NSW parliament more accessible to citizens.

I quote the text of the letters here. For the originals see the end [1]

The Hon Penny Sharpe MLC
Shadow Minister for Transport

The Hon. Greg Pearce MLC
Minister for Finance and Services

Dear Minister

I am writing in support of the Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation (PMO) OpenAustralia (www.OpenAustralia.org).

OpenAustralia is a not-for-profit, volunteer based organisation that aims to make it easy for people to keep track of their Federal representatives by providing alerts when any given Member of Parliament speaks.

Currently, OpenAustralia does not have the ability to provide this service to the citizens of NSW on behalf of their representatives because of issues in accessing the Parliament of NSW’s Hansard feed and due to a lack of funding to expand their operations.

I believe the citizens of NSW would benefit from such a service in this state.

OpenAustralia would require a small grant of up to $10,000 to allow expansion of their work.

Given the Government’s state commitment to “making it easier for NSW citizens to interact with government, to harnessing the oppurtunities provided by ICT to improve government operations, and to developing the ICT industry in NSW”, could you investigate if there is funding available to OpenAustralia to assist them to make it easier for NSW citizens to access and interact with the work of their elected representatives?

Yours sincerely

Penny Sharpe MLC

The Hon Penny Sharpe MLC
Shadow Minister for Transport

The Hon. Don Harwin MLC
President of the Legislative Council of NSW

Dear President

I am writing to request your assistance in convening a meeting with the Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation (PMO) OpenAustralia.

PMOs are organisations set up by citizens to monitor or assess the functioning of parliaments or their individual members.

OpenAustralia aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their Federal representatives by providing alerts when any given Member of Parliament speaks.

Currently, OpenAustralia.org does not have the ability to provide this service to the citizens of NSW on behalf of their state representatives because of issues in accessing the Parliament of NSW’s Hansard feed.

The service that OpenAustralia provides is a successful blueprint for engaging citizens with the work of their elected representatives.

I believe the citizens of NSW would benefit from such a service here.

I would be grateful for your assistance in convening a meeting between Dr Matthew Landauer, Director, OpenAustralia Foundation and the Parliamentary Information Services section to see what can be done to enable OpenAustralia to provide their service to citizens of NSW.

For more information about OpenAustralia, please visit www.OpenAustralia.org

Yours sincerely

Penny Sharpe MLC

We thank Penny Sharpe for her support and for writing these letters. We are looking forward to where this goes.

[1] Scans of letters from Penny Sharpe

The OpenAustralia Foundation has achieved some remarkable things in the few short years that it’s been going. We’ve built some great projects that have shown Australia that democracy and the internet can be very good and positive bed-fellows, done a bit to help push governments in the right direction and most importantly of all, helped over one million Australians connect with their Politicians, Governments and Communities through projects like OpenAustralia, PlanningAlerts and Election Leaflets.

It’s been amazing, thrilling and very very satisfying, but having said that, it’s been hard. Really hard.

The sad but difficult reality is that we’ve been struggling to find a way to make this whole enterprise sustainable. What do we mean by that?

Our online democracy projects have been built on the creativity and hard work of our volunteers. Most people dip in, help a little using their specialist (and usually highly-paid) skills to fix something and then dip out when their other commitments and life takes over.

We also have a core group consisting of the founders, Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska and an early volunteer, now board member, Henare Degan, that do around 90-95% of the work. This in itself is not a problem. Nobody is making us do this! However, it has, especially over the last two years become increasingly difficult to put in the large number of unpaid hours that’s required to maintain, nurture and build the OpenAustralia Foundation and its projects so that we continue what we started funded only by our own savings and a burning desire to make a difference.

Early on, a couple of months of the very early prototype development of PlanningAlerts was funded by the Government 2.0 taskforce. Other than that all unpaid.

A couple of months ago we received a surprise email from a supporter we’d never been contacted by before. Guy King wrote a short mail to us to say he was considering donating some money. “Were we still busy?” He asked “What would we do with money?”

This is what we wrote back:

Hi Guy,

Thanks for getting in touch!

The project is still active, though we haven’t built any new projects
in a while and the blog has definitely been neglected. Over the last
year or so we’ve been maintaining and developing the existing
projects. For instance, the scraper for OpenAustralia.org was
rewritten to handle the changes that aph.gov.au made to the way they
store the Hansard data. We ran ElectionLeaflets.org.au for the recent
Queensland election and we’ve steadily been expanding the reach of
PlanningAlerts.org.au by adding new local councils. We’re now covering
129 councils and we’ve sent out over 3.5 million development
applications.

As you’re probably aware, the vast majority of the work on the
projects is done by volunteers.

The biggest barrier to building new projects, which of course we
desperately want to do, is a shortage of funding. We’ve found that the
sustained effort required in getting a new project off the ground and
nurturing it (including building a community around it) is far too big
a commitment for people to undertake unpaid.

Over the last years we’ve tried to obtain funding from numerous
sources. Our major obstacle has been that we don’t fit into the
traditional model of charitable work in Australia. That’s why our only
major successful bit of external funding so far was actually from the
Federal government Gov 2.0 Taskforce who funded the building of the
very initial prototype of PlanningAlerts.org.au.

So, in a word, a significant donation would provide an extraordinary
shot-in-the-arm to everything we do.

Then I laid out our plan with what we would do with the money.

Shortly after this exchange his significant donation came through.

The only reason I’m not including what I wrote there is I don’t want to spoil the surprises we have in store over the coming weeks and months. What I will say is that the donation will make it possible for us to create and launch at least two new major projects this year and we’re already hard at work on the first one!

On behalf of OpenAustralia Foundation and all Australians who care about democracy and transparency I want to thank Guy for his donation. It’s going to help make amazing things happen.

Illustration credit pupilasgustativas