OpenAustralia

The Register of Members’ Interests is on our doorstep

Published by matthew | Filed under Announcement

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A copy of the Register of Members’ Interests for the House of Representatives has quite literarily arrived on our doorstep! We can now begin the task of scanning and transcribing. Please contact us at contact@openaustralia.org if you want to help with the transcribing. If we get enough people this won’t be too big a task.

We won’t put the result online until the committee that looks after the Register has met and discussed what we’re doing. This won’t happen until the end of August when the House of Representatives is back from recess. That gives us plenty of time to get on with the job.

We’ve blogged about this several times before: “The Register of Members’ Interests is not available online“; “Register of Members’ Interests update“; “I’ve got it written down here on a piece of paper“; “The register is on its way“.

Let the fun begin.

Who’s blogging about OpenAustralia?

Published by Nathanael | Filed under Uncategorized

It’s only been live for a few weeks but already OpenAustralia has received great coverage and publicity from the online community.

Here are some links to articles and blog posts about OpenAustralia:

• Kat and Matt are interviewed by Cameron Reilly on the TPN GDay World podcast - also Cameron blogged about OpenAustralia previously
• Blog post by Sean Carmody
• Peter Timmins talks about OpenAustralia on his “Open and Shut” FOI blog
• Article on Libraries Interact
• Tim Norton promotes it on the official blogs of the Australian Greens Senators
• A blog post by me
• A mention on Not a Hedgehog
• Darren Lewin-Hill gives us a plug on Northcote Independent
• Dan Cass gives us his views on using OpenAustralia on his blog Green Funk
• Maxine writes about OpenAustralia on the Web Directions blog
• An article I wrote for Sydney Norg
• John Lampard gives us a mention
• OpenAustralia makes it onto CNet thanks to Matt Asay
• Richard Allan mentions OpenAustralia on the UK Power of Information Task Force blog
• Sarah Stokely was “pimping” OpenAustralia at the Microsoft Politics & Technology event in Canberra last week and over at Crikey she said OpenAustralia is “quite possibly the best thing to happen online for democracy in Australia this year” 
• Andrew Bartlett writes about us
• Sam Clifford blogs about OpenAustralia on Public Polity
• Kim at Larvatus Prodeo looks forward to us putting Senate hansards online
• Peter Martin is a fan
• On The Open Source Report
• And Stilgherrian promotes OpenAustralia

… plus more.

Thanks everyone for promoting, discussing and providing feedback on OpenAustralia. Also make sure you follow us on Twitter at @OpenAustralia.

The Register is on its way

Published by kat | Filed under Announcement

The sample volume of the Register of Members’ Interests is in many ways a mundane looking tome. Representatives’ entries look like forms any one of us might fill in. Some standard and diligent, no doubt from years of filling in the same forms with exactly the information requested in the headings, others’ perhaps overly detailed. Cover letters volunteering information absolutely not requested when Members feel they should do so. Typically, we see shares, names of banks mortgages are with, homes, and cars, along with membership of clubs and associations. However, there are no amounts specified in the pecuniary interests stated. Its only possible to infer from some of the headings where there is a requirement to register items over a certain figure. eg. Gifts worth over $750.

The Committee of Privileges and Members’ Interests was not able to discuss our republishing of the Register of Members’ Interests online last week. It is not expected to meet again until August when Parliamentary sittings resume. In the meantime, the Registrar for the Committee of Privileges and Members’ Interests is arranging to send the full Register of Members’ Interests to OpenAustralia. We’ll then transcribe these entries, many of which (at least in the sample volume) are forms filled in by hand. The pages are however sparsely filled which makes the whole enterprise look much more manageable. The first step will be digitizing all the pages, which we’re hoping will involve a friendly neighbourhood bulk scanner. Step two may be a couple of passes, typed entries we hope will run through some OCR software, and then we may well be asking for some volunteers to help with the handwritten entries. Look out for an update soon!

Richard Allan - The Power of Information

Published by matthew | Filed under Uncategorized

About a week ago, shortly after the public launch of OpenAustralia, we were contacted by Richard Allan, who has been involved with TheyWorkForYou over a number of years. He used to be a UK Member of Parliament with a strong interest in technology issues.

While he was an MP, he even wrote the first version of the email alerts system for TheyWorkForYou.

He now works for Cisco UK in the area of technology policy issues. He has a lot of dealings with European governments in the area of telecoms legislation and the like.

He also chairs a UK Task Force called Power of Information which was established by the Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson MP in March 2008 which is about opening up government information in all of its various forms.

In a very nice coincidence he was coming on a visit to Australia to speak at a conference in Brisbane and meet politicians and government officials in Sydney and Canberra.

Yesterday night he took time out from his busy schedule to meet Kat and myself for dinner in Sydney. We talked about a lot of things including his dealings with people from MySociety, his plans for telling people about OpenAustralia and his work with Cisco and the Power of Information Task Force.

OpenAustralia is a good example of what is possible by opening up information. Because the Parliament website publishes the Hansard daily online we can take that and effectively repackage it into something that is more engaging and more oriented to how actually people want to read and interact with this information.

For his meetings with Australian government officials and politicians next week he can now use OpenAustralia.org as a case study to show what people, just ordinary, but technologically capable people, can build on their own without waiting for the government to do it for them.

We had a really interesting conversation over dinner with Richard. We certainly learned a great deal. We also hope that he will be one of the many people to help OpenAustralia grow and become more popular over the coming months and years.

It’s been an exciting week

Published by matthew | Filed under Uncategorized

It’s now been just under a week since we launched OpenAustralia to the wide world. The response has been overwhelming considering just how little we did to let people know about it. You might have noticed that we’ve seemed a little quiet in the last week (i.e. no new blog posts until today) but that’s just because we’ve been trying to keep up with the messages coming our way.

So, if we haven’t gotten back to you please be patient we’ll get to you soon!

Thank you everyone for your very kind words of congratulations and support. It means a lot to us.

This is just the beginning - so expect to see a lot of new and exciting things to come.

I’ve got it written down here on a piece of paper

Published by kat | Filed under Uncategorized

As of June 3rd, some more information on the Register of Members’ Interests
“… as far as volume is concerned there are 7 binders with A4 sheets in them the size of the register grows progressively during the life of a parliament as members must notify ‘alterations of their interests’ within 28 days of the alterations occurring - at present its probably around the 1200-1500 pages but it would keep growing for the rest of the term of the Parliament.”

and a useful bit of history today, again from the Registrar, Bernard Wright (thanks Bernard)
“When the system [Register of Members' Interests] was put in place in 1984 Members were also required to declare relevant interests orally when speaking in debates, but this requirement was dropped on the grounds that their interests had been declared in writing and that these declarations were public. Some members continue to make oral declarations, and the case you have cited is an example, but these are voluntary.”

Register of Members’ Interests update

Published by matthew | Filed under Development

We’ve been in email exchange with the Registrar of Members’ Interests, Bernard Wright. He’s been very helpful but the situation with the Register of Members’ Interests falls somewhat short of ideal.

Not only, as mentioned before, is the register only kept in one office in Canberra, and not available online for everyone to see, it is not even available in electronic form.

Rather, the Register of Members’ Interests is a set of 7 binders with around 1500 A4 sheets in them, which are continually updated (by hand) throughout the course of the parliamentary term. Supposedly, many of the sheets are handwritten. Eek! What a lot of work for the Registrar, and what little gain for the public!

It does seem anachronistic that such an important public document remains so difficult for ordinary citizens to gain access to.

We’ll keep plugging away at this to ensure that this document goes online in the near future. We’re not sure how yet, but we’re working on it!

Anyone want to help? We’d love to hear from you with ideas or practical assistance

OpenAustralia going live on Monday 16th June!

Published by matthew | Filed under Announcement

It is my very great pleasure to announce that OpenAustralia will be going public and live on Monday 16th June. This will be a fully open public beta.

We have one big thing we would still like to get done before the launch. We are in the middle of doing a visual redesign of the website. We’re definitely not changing any of the layout or functionality as we think it’s great already. We just want to give it a little visual aussie love - a fresh coat of paint if you will.

We’re hoping we can do this before the launch date, but if not we’ll just launch it as it is.

The launch is just under three weeks away.

Start telling your friends - write some blog posts about it, twitter away, announce it on Facebook and spread the word.

We’ll look back at the launch in years to come and see it as a significant step towards a fairer, more informed, more engaged and better democracy!