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 bit of fun over a weekend sharing what we where doing and working on the open source projects that OpenAustralia runs.

The hackfest started on Saturday with about a dozen volunteers coming along and listening to quick introductory talks from Matthew and myself. We reminded everyone of the different projects that the foundation runs: OpenAustralia.org, Election Leaflets and PlanningAlerts.

Most people decided to hack on PlanningAlerts, a project which allows people to get alerts about what is being built or knocked down in their area. Using an online tool called ScraperWiki you can quickly and easily contribute new planning authorities to PlanningAlerts. During the two afternoons (true hackers aren’t morning people!) our volunteers took up the challenge to write ScraperWiki scrapers for PlanningAlerts with zeal.

Seven people wrote scrapers for nineteen planning authorities like Hobart City Council, Redfern-Waterloo Authority or Townsville City Council all around Australia, including councils in two states we previously didn’t cover – Western Australia and Tasmania.

What does this mean in practical terms? An additional 1,823,124 Australians can now find out what’s happening in their local community using PlanningAlerts. This is a huge result, coming from a relatively modest effort and a small group of people.

A massive thank you to all of the volunteers that attended the hackfest, especially the following people that wrote scrapers: Sam Cavenagh, Nick Evershed, Mark Kinkade, Matthew Landauer, James Polley, Kris Splittgerber and Adam Stiskala. Let’s do this again some time.

And don’t forget to remind your friends and family to sign up for PlanningAlerts!

My mum called me from Sydney Airport yesterday. She was stopping over from New Zealand on her way to Batchelor in the Northern Territory where her and her husband are moving.

After I got off the phone to her I remembered that PlanningAlerts didn’t cover anywhere in the NT and I also remembered – what mother doesn’t love code written for her!

So I got to work and found that there seems to be a single planning authority in the NT, the Northern Territory Lands Group. After an hour or so I’d been able to write a ScraperWiki scraper for this data and deploy it to the live site, which means PlanningAlerts now covers another 229,675 people in the Territory.

Welcome to Australia mum and welcome to PlanningAlerts Territorians!

View Larger Map

If you live in the territory and you’ve signed up for PlanningAlerts you should already be getting alerts. If you have friends or family in the territory, please let them know about PlanningAlerts.

Cheers,

Henare
OpenAustralia Foundation volunteer

P.S. If anyone has any more information about the NT planning system that I may have missed or information about any other planning systems around Australia that might be of interest, please let us know in the comments.

P.P.S. If your mum lives in an area not covered by PlanningAlerts, why not write a scraper for her today? No need to wait for Mother’s Day, mums like code all year ’round :)

P.P.P.S. Come to our hackfest tomorrow if you want to learn how to write your mum a PlanningAlerts scraper.

It’s all a bit last minute. What’s the worst that happens? Nobody turns up and the three of us spend the weekend hacking. That’s okay too.

However, it would be much more fun if you came too!

We’ve got a couple of quick talks lined up to warm you up and give you some inspiration, then a full weekend dedicated to hacking on everything OpenAustralia. Come along and learn, share and build interesting things in and around open data, open government and civic hacking.

Want to reboot OpenAustralia.org by fixing the scraper? How about some finishing touches to Election Leaflets to monitor future Australian elections? Or do you want to learn how to help tens of thousands of people get PlanningAlerts by writing a simple scraper (anyone can do it!)? Then register here:

https://oa-hackfest.eventbrite.com/

This event will be hosted at Google Sydney next weekend the 10th and 11th of September, here’s our plan for the weekend:

Saturday

11:30 – Doors open
12:00 – Introduction and housekeeping
12:15 – The Gears That Power the Tubes of OpenAustralia – Matthew Landauer
12:30 – An Introduction to Guerrilla Data Liberation with ScraperWiki – Henare Degan
12:45 – Let the hacking begin
18:00 – We’ll order pizzas with anyone interested
22:00 – Doors close

Sunday

11:30 – Doors open / Let the hacking begin
16:00 – Stop hacking, start presentations – show us what you’ve build, fixed or learnt!
18:00 – Doors close, optional beers at the pub

Google are kindly supplying the venue, power and WiFi so all you need to do is bring along your notebook, some snacks to keep you hacking through the day and pizza money if you’re a hungry hacker come Saturday evening.

Sign up to the OpenAustralia Community mailing list if you have any questions and don’t forget to tag your tweets, photos, etc. #oahack

Cheers,

Henare, Matthew and Tim
OpenAustralia Foundation volunteers

We’ve had a few requests over the last few months for access to these leaflets so we’ve set up an archive site that allows you to see them: federal2010.electionleaflets.org.au

This is by no means a permanent solution for being able to use the site for multiple elections – us geeks would call it a hack. To run Election Leaflets for another election, we still need interested volunteers or organisations willing to fund the work required to provide Australia with live election monitoring. Please contact us if you can help.

One of the major things that determines this is the planning process that our councils look after. If you’ve ever tried to make a submission on a development application you will know that it can be a difficult process to understand. Chances are you’ve not bothered because it all seemed like too much trouble.

Today we want to let you know about a new PlanningAlerts feature which makes this simple. Now when you click on a development application, you’ll be able to make a submission to council right on the PlanningAlerts page for the application – no more hunting down the right form, email address or even which council to send it to. We do the boring stuff for you automatically.

This means you have the opportunity to directly affect whether an application will get approved or not. It “closes the loop”, so that not only do you find out about things planned near you, you can easily and directly do something about them.

You also get to see what other people have said because all comments automatically go up on the site once they’re sent to the planning authority.

Over the next couple of weeks we will be rolling out the new feature, adding it council by council. When the feature has been rolled out for your council you will see the big new comment box. If it hasn’t been rolled out yet you can help by finding the email address that submissions should go to for your council and sending that to us.

As this feature is brand new it’s bound to have some niggling problems. So, please help by letting us know about any problems that you find or things that could be done to improve the service.

To get started go to http://www.planningalerts.org.au/ and enter your street address.

It’s your neighbourhood. Make sure you have a hand in how it develops.

Matthew and Henare
OpenAustralia Foundation Volunteers

We have just over seven weeks until the NSW State Election and it’s going to be bitter. Leaflets are already in the news and people have been calling on us to run Election Leaflets during this election.

Luckily Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell and I recently attended linux.conf.au in Brisbane and as we did last year we decided to spend what little free time we had hacking on OpenAustralia Foundation projects.

This time we chose Election Leaflets and the good news is we’ve done it. I’m very pleased to announce that we’re running Election Leaflets for the 2011 NSW State Election.

From today, when you visit ElectionLeaflets.org.au you’ll see election leaflets that have been uploaded by people all over the state that want to make a difference before they vote.

If you want to make a difference, gather up some leaflets and start uploading.

Wait, where are the Federal election leaflets?

UPDATE: There’s now an archive site of the 2010 Federal Election Leaflets available.

That’s a good question. Rest assured, they’re still there. They just won’t show up when you browse the website (but are still visible if you know an old link).

We haven’t yet built a way to show these leaflets at the same time, but we’re working on it.

As always, we could do with a hand so please volunteer or donate today.

It’s easiest to see with an example:

View Larger Map

When you click on one of the points on a map, as well as the description of the development application, there is now a link “More Information” which takes you to the page on PlanningAlerts for that application.

That simple change just made embedded maps a whole lot more useful.

This is how to do it for yourself:

1. Enter a street address on www.planningalerts.org.au and click Search.
2. Copy the URL of the link to “Subscribe to an RSS feed for applications near here”
3. Then go to Google Maps, paste that URL into its search box
4. Add &style=html to the end of the URL in the search box. This is the new bit that adds the “More information” link.
5. Click Search Maps
6. Click the Link link to the top right of the map, and copy the Paste HTML to embed in website code
7. Paste that code into your blog post, sidebar, or wherever (you can alter the code to change its size etc.)

Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell and I attended the conference all week and had an excellent time learning lots and meeting interesting people. We volunteered to run the OpenAustralia stall yesterday the 29th of January and it turned out to be a great day.

OpenAustralia volunteers showing the public our projects

We got the chance to meet a whole host of people who had never heard of us and educate them about what we do and what our projects have to offer. It was interesting to find that some people had heard of one of our projects, really enjoyed using it, but were not aware that we run a variety of projects.

We also gave away a bunch of OpenAustralia “Hack Democracy” t-shirts to grinning Open Day attendees.

Open Day visitors show of their new shirts

We’d like to congratulate all of the organisers and volunteers that made linux.conf.au such a success in 2011, against amazing odds. We’d especially like to thank Clinton Roy for heading up the organisation of Open Day and inviting the Foundation to host a stall.

See you next year in Ballarat!

Cheers,

Tim and Henare
OpenAustralia Volunteers

PS. Those that came along to Open Day got an exclusive early announcement of something very special. Stay tuned for more news on this blog in a few days time :)

Until now, the focus of PlanningAlerts has been squarely and clearly about notifying you of new development applications in your area. That notification happens via email.

We’ve added two new big features which allow you to easily explore development applications and comment on them.

Commenting

Finding out about a new development application in your neighbourhood should be the start of something. If it’s something that you agree with or disagree with the standard course of action is that you submit a comment on the development application to your local council.

Really, there should be a way for the community at large to discuss these issues without the local council having to act as an intermediary. Of course, this already happens on the Internet in the form of people writing blog posts, talking on Twitter and Facebook and numerous other avenues.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see all those conversations in one place, alongside the development application itself? Then, the application page becomes a jumping off point to read what people think all over the place.

To begin with, this is what we’ve done: now whenever you tweet about a development application, and include a link to the PlanningAlerts page, it will be listed on our site:

We’re hoping this will spark discussion and make PlanningAlerts even more useful by allowing people to provide additional information about the development application.

One use of this could be taking a photo with your mobile phone (after find the location using our augmented reality mobile application, of course) and tweeting about it. The link will then show up on PlanningAlerts, allowing others to see what the new development looks like.

Give it a try and let us know what interesting uses you come up with by posting a comment.

Exploring

We’ve also changed the home page. You can now enter a street address and it will immediately show you recent development applications nearby. No need to wait on receiving your first email alert.

This is great for people who’ve never used the service before. They get a taste of what it does before they commit to entering their email address:

We hope you enjoy these new features and don’t forget you can help us improve them by posting a comment below, using the feedback button on PlanningAlerts or, even better, getting involved yourself.

Henare, Kat and Matthew

A few people believe this to be a storm in a teacup. For example, one commentor, JP, said

Oh, grow up. It’s not bizarre, it’s routine. So is the solution: short-term, request that Customs whitelist the site; long-term, request that their filtering provider reclassify it.

So, here’s what happened next. October 30 I sent this:

Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2010 11:18:38 +1100
Subject: Re: FW: RE: Query about Customs access to openaustralia.org
[SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] [T20101020000LS040Z80472]
From: Matthew Landauer
To: information@customs.gov.au

Hello [redacted],

Thanks very much for your response and the response of the IT security
section.

I would like to clarify a point. The website www.openaustralia.org is
absolutely not a blog. The website republishes the Federal Hansard, the
Federal proceedings of Parliament, which definitely doesn’t fall under the
definition of a blog as was presented in the forwarded message from the IT
security section.

I understand from your email that the classification of
www.openaustralia.org as a blog was undertaken by a third party who provides
your internet filtering technology.

Could you please let me know who provides this third party internet
filtering so that I could contact them and address this error of
classification with them directly as it undoubtedly affects not just your
department but other organisations who use the same internet filtering
technology.

All the best,
Matthew Landauer

After most of the week goes by without a reply or any kind of acknowledgment I send another quick email

Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2010 13:22:35 +1100
Subject: Fwd: FW: RE: Query about Customs access to openaustralia.org
[SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] [T20101020000LS040Z80472]
From: Matthew Landauer
To: information@customs.gov.au

Hello [redacted],

Could you please let me know an ETA for when I might expect a reply to my
previous email.

Thank you.

All the best,
Matthew Landauer

Then

Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2010 07:55:45 +1100 (EST)
To: Matthew Landauer
Subject: RE: Fwd: FW: RE: Query about Customs access to openaustralia.org [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] [T20101020000LS010Z84292]
From: information@customs.gov.au

Matthew

The response to your original email is the only one I have seen. The decision would lay with our IT Security Section and Customs Management to determine the applicability of access to web sites external to the Customs website.

I never saw your email dated October 30 and cannot see what happened with that email.

I will again forward your email to our IT Security section for their consideration and possible response.

I cannot provide a time frame for a response or any further details.

Regards

[redacted]

I thanked him for his email and said that I was looking forward to the response from the IT security section.

Then, silence.

Monday last week I sent a follow up reminder email asking for any updates. Silence again.

I would like to get this issue resolved as quickly as possible. Until it’s resolved, employees of this government department do not have access to a very useful tool for keeping abreast of developments in Federal parliament.

We’re currently at step one. It’s been nearly a month trying to find out who provides the departments’ internet filtering software.

As an outsider trying to help resolve this situation, it is extremely difficult. If there are issues with giving this information out, then nobody has said that.

You would think this would be a simple matter to resolve.