OpenAustralia

From the workshop: OpenAustralia Labs

Published by Henare Degan | Filed under Announcement, Development

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 weeks linux.conf.au 2010, held in Wellington, New Zealand, Tim and Henare setup a new site called OpenAustralia Labs.

Labs is a place to showcase some of our more crazy experiments, or just things that aren’t quite ready for prime-time.

We have two experiments already posted to labs with more coming soon:

Register of Interests Transcriber

The Register of Interests Transcriber is Tim’s tool for turning the scanned register we opened up about a year ago into searchable passages of text. It’s been looking for a home since Tim created it a few months ago.

This is a tool we’d really like to see emerge from the labs and appear on the live OpenAustralia.org site so if you think you could help make it more polished, please check out the code and start discussing it on our Community mailing list.

Words in Parliament

This is an interesting little experiment created by Stephen Bartlett during our Melbourne hackfest. It grabs the most recent house debate and analyses the most frequently spoken words in that debate.

If you have any experiments you’d like to try out and demonstrate on OpenAustralia Labs, please don’t hesitate to discuss it on our community mailing list or create a ticket against the new Labs component on our issue tracker.

Launching our new website: Planning Alerts

Published by Matthew Landauer | Filed under Announcement

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 door neighbour was going to knock their house down (you’d get a letter through the door telling you they had applied for planning permission and asking you what you thought about it). But you’d probably never find out if the old cinema or pub 5 streets away is going to be converted into luxury flats until the bulldozers turned up.

PlanningAlerts.org.au is a free service which searches as many planning authority websites as it can find and emails you details of applications near you. The aim of this to enable shared scrutiny of what is being built (and knocked down) in peoples’ communities.

PlanningAlerts.org.au is brought to you by the OpenAustralia Foundation with financial assistance from the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce. It was adapted for Australia by Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska, and is based on the UK site PlanningAlerts.com, built by Richard Pope, Mikel Maron, Sam Smith, Duncan Parkes, Tom Hughes and Andy Armstrong.

We’re not covering all the planning authorities yet. We’re nowhere near actually. We’ve started with the 50 or so authorities with the larger populations so we’re actually covering a good percentage of the country’s population.

If you’re interested in adding a screen scraper for your local authority we’ve made it pretty easy for you. All the software that runs the site and all the screen scraper code is open-source, so please take it and have fun!

Two great hackfest days!

Published by Matthew Landauer | Filed under Announcement, Development

(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 many people feel.

This time we went all out with a two day hackfest – 10:30am till 8pm both days. That’s over 18 hours of hacking! As well as the venue and a fabulous team of volunteers, which included Tim Ansell, James Polley and Pamela Fox, Google provided lunch and snacks for both days. Thank you to Google for supporting this community!

It was an amazing turnout by an incredibly talented group of people. Over 90 people took part, including a surprise group from CSIRO who happened to be wandering past and dropped in to see what we were up to. We were also delighted to have 30 people take part in the first ever retroactively-named OpenAustralia installfest – installing the development virtual machine onto their laptops, and walking through the first steps showing how they can make changes to the code, test locally, and then submit to our repository on github. During the course of the hackfest, we had half a dozen or so patches pushed to us – we’re still working through the process of accepting them all! We also had 40-odd updates to bugs on our tracker.

Photos by Halans. For more fabulous photos by Halans and others see Flickr

This hackfest was timed to coincide with the Gov2.0 TaskforceMashupAustralia competition, and we encouraged people to work on mashups for the competition, OpenAustralia itself, or any other civic-minded project.

At the same time hacking on MashupAustralia on the weekend was the #melbhack session, organised by Lonely Planet and the GovHack folks.

If people weren’t in the mood for hacking, either on a mashup or OpenAustralia, we had presentations and directed hacking sessions scheduled throughout both days. Plenty for all to do.

We gave out small prizes (donated by Google) to some of our favourite mashups created over the weekend. Working demos, however rough, won out over plans, however well-formed.

Our favourite mashup, the “Suburb Matchmaker“, was created over the weekend by Raul Alberto Caceres (@totocol), Daniela Fernandez (@danira_98) and Roberto Arias Alegria (@roberto8080). It was particularly impressive that this team met over lunch on the first day and decided on the spot to work together. “Suburb Matchmaker” helps you find the suburb that’s right for you by answering some simple questions.

Second place went to the “Frog Census” by Simon Swain (@psi6030). See where and when different frogs have been spotted in South Australia.

The irreverant “Bouncing Teapots” by Dan Bethell (@fxmonkeydan) and Ray Haleblian (@rhaleblian) came third. The “Bouncing Teapots” simulated members of the House of Representatives as teapots falling where the more time they spoke in parliament the more bouncy they were.

We hope that one of these or one the many other projects that were worked on over the weekend will win the MashupAustralia competition!

To follow OpenAustralia’s progress and find out when we’ll be running the next Hackfest near you please read our blog, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or join our community mailing list on Google Groups!

OpenAustralia Hackfest – MashupAustralia Edition

Published by Henare Degan | Filed under Announcement, Development

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 a $10,000 first prize. There’s also no better way to show the value of opening up government data then creating a practical demonstration!

We were thinking of calling the event, somewhat irreverently “iHack 2.0 – concentrated data extracts” or “Hacked Open” but in the end thought that might be a tad confusing. So, it’s simply the “OpenAustralia Hackfest – The MashupAustralia Edition”.

See our hackfest site more information and to register. Please retweet our Twitter announcement and don’t forget to tag your tweets, posts and photos with the OpenAustralia Hackfest tag #oahack.

The ups and downs of funding new projects

Published by Matthew Landauer | Filed under Announcement, Development

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 your area and look at them on a map? And do all of this without having to know what your local council is or how to navigate their website.

Gone would be the days when some building gets knocked down or some house gets extended without you knowing about it first.

For more details see the application in full that we submitted.

Unfortunately, last weekend we found out that the auDA Foundation Board decided not to fund our proposal. We’re obviously very disappointed but certainly not disheartened.

So, here is a call out to help us. Please read our application and tell us (by commenting on this post) what can be improved with the application. Suggest amendments and changes in approach so that next time we apply for funding, we’ll do a better job.

Also, if you have ideas for other funding organisations we should apply to for this project, let us know. We’ve also applied for funding for this project to the Government 2.0 Taskforce. We should hopefully hear back soon about that.

Fox Force Five: OpenAustralia, eDemocracy and Education

Published by Matthew Landauer | Filed under Media

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Published by Matthew Landauer | Filed under Uncategorized

One Sunday morning, a bit over two weeks ago, Kat, busy putting the finishing touches to her article on transparency for the Centre for Policy Development’s group submission to the government 2.0 taskforce “Upgrading Democracy” leans over to me and says:

“How about we submit a Perl app to the taskforce as an essay in transparency?”

I say, “Okay… but I’ll write it in Ruby”

A perfect half serious, half tongue-in-cheek example of what we’re about. If you have the choice between talking about something and doing something, “do” wins every time.

So, I started writing a little Ruby script to screen scrape data from the Federal Register of Lobbyists which is one of those things that I’d been meaning to take a look at for a long time. Now you might reasonably ask, why do that?

The Federal Register of Lobbyists “… is a public document that contains information about lobbyists who make representations to Government on behalf of their clients”

Look at how the Federal Register of Lobbyists is organised. You can get a list of all the lobbyists on the register and for each of those you can follow the link which leads you to the list of clients they represent.

This is useful if you know the name of a lobbying firm or individual but not a whole lot of use if you know the name of a client and want to find out who lobbies for them on their behalf.

So the purpose of writing the little Ruby script was simply to download the information from the whole register by downloading 270 or so web pages, extract all the relevant information from the web pages and save it as a local file in a format that can then be easily loaded into any spreadsheet program for easy analysis.

This program demonstrates the value of transparency on a dataset which is about transparency. It essentially “unlocks” the data that is trapped on the web pages in a form which makes it hard to analyse. Many people have talked about this as the importance of data and API’s. I won’t try to repeat or even summarise what they’ve said.

Anyway, I submit the program to the taskforce with a small explanatory email. In the email I say that I had originally intended to submit the resulting data with the submission but did not because the website that hosts the register crashed and the copyright on the website did not allow for republishing without permission.

So, all I was submitting was the source code for a small Ruby script which is copyright OpenAustralia Foundation and I licensed under the GPL, so that anyone can use and alter the script freely within the terms of license.

And then I mostly forgot about it…

Some time passed…

Lots of submissions were appearing on the taskforce website but mine wasn’t there. What was going on? I emailed the taskforce to find out, received a reply from the secretariat explaining that the submission would be up early next week as they were processing many submissions.

Perfectly fair. The following week rolls round, more submissions appear on the taskforce website, but mine is still not there. That’s strange. On the Thursday I email again, asking what’s happened, I even mention it on Twitter, but no luck.

Finally, yesterday, more than two weeks after I emailed the taskforce my submission I send another email outlining the dates of all my correspondence and asking again when my submission would appear.

Then, today I receive this email

Good afternoon Matthew,

Apologies for the delay in dealing with your submission and correspondence. Putting submissions online is an ongoing process that is still being worked through, particularly after the redesign of the Submissions page. We are working to have the remaining submissions online by the end of this week.

We have been analysing security issues about putting your submission online. The Taskforce blog is hosted on a Department of Finance and Deregulation server, and as such is subject to security policies which prevent us from offering your program as a direct download to users.

However we have placed the emailed text of your submission on the Submissions page in whole, including the link to the page where users will still be able to access the program. Please see http://gov2.net.au/submissions/matthew-landauer-openaustralia-foundation/

We are also asking all submission authors if they would like the Wordpress comment function switched on for their submission. Should we turn it on for yours?

Regards,

Government 2.0 Taskforce Secretariat
Australian Government Information Management Office
Department of Finance and Deregulation

“Security issues” eh? What does that mean?

Thanks for responding. I greatly appreciate it.

I’m a little surprised, to put it mildly, to hear you’re saying that
there are security issues with putting my submission online. What
exactly are those security concerns? Maybe I can help put any fear to
rest by answering some questions?

As for comments on my submission please go ahead and switch them on.

A small point of clarification on my end – the emailed text (without
the program) is not my submission. That you have put the text up I
think is a good first step. The emailed text was a little further
explanation but the core of my submission is still the Ruby program.
So, I hope that we can work through whatever security concerns you
might have so that my submission in full can be put up on the
taskforce blog along with those of everyone else.

All the best,
Matthew

And shortly thereafter, I get the following response

Hi Matthew,

To be more specific – the security policies that stop us from putting up your program for download aren’t about the nature of the program. They are restrictions about offering externally-created code for download on a departmentally-hosted website.

We acknowledge that you didn’t consider the email to be your submission, and are able to replace/update the text we have put up on the Submissions page if you want to make changes to what is online now. And of course we will retain the link to your Github page so that blog users will still have access to your program, albeit indirectly.

Regards,

Government 2.0 Taskforce Secretariat

And then my response is

I obviously don’t know what the departments guidelines are
specifically, but I would imagine (applying common-sense to this) that
there are restrictions on the distribution of program binaries via the
website.

However, what I’m supplying is source code which by itself is of no
security threat. It is not a binary program where someone clicks on a
link and then it starts up a nasty program which does something
terrible. This is a bit of source code that by itself does nothing. It
is no different then a piece of text, of which there is an enormous
amount on the taskforce website.

In light of this, I would ask you to reconsider publishing the program
in full on your website.

All the best,
Matthew

Let’s hope that this can get resolved quickly. I’m sure that nobody could have anticipated that someone would come along and do an apparently silly thing like submit a Ruby program as a submission to a government taskforce, but in this instance it made good sense, as a practical way of demonstrating many facets of what it takes to do government 2.0 in a practical way.

I took care not to infringe any copyright of the original data, licensed the script under a liberal license so that anyone could reuse it and still there was a problem…

Melbourne’s first OpenAustralia hackfest

Published by Henare Degan | Filed under Announcement

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 happy to announce that several of the founders of OpenAustralia will be making the trip to Melbourne so you can talk to them about the project, put forward your own ideas, and get to work right away!

If you’re a software hacker, you can dive in and work on bugs, pick an item from the wishlist and start creating a new feature, or work on just about anything you’d like to to improve or extend OpenAustralia. The sky’s the limit!

If you’re a fan or user of OpenAustralia and you’re not technically minded, fear not! Websites don’t get better without people USING them and TESTING them to give us ideas on how to improve! If you’re a journalist or someone who really loves statistics and databases, help us by coming up with crazy searches that push the limits of what OpenAustralia can do!

ThoughtWorks is kindly hosting the hackfest, which kicks off at 12 noon and will go until 5pm. Please note you’ll need to bring your own laptop. A ThoughtWorks volunteer will meet hackfest attendees at 12 sharp to let them in the building, so please be on time.

Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you think might be interested – but note that due to the size of the room, we won’t be able to accept more than 30 people for this event.

RSVP by Wednesday, 23 September please, so we can arrange nametags.

We look forward to working with you to make our democracy a little more open!

From the OpenAustralia team.