My first OpenAustralia Foundation talk, given at the LGWebnetowrk, presenting an overview of http://www.PlanningAlerts.org.au, http://www.electionleaflets.org.au and http://www.openaustralia.org
5. OpenAustralia
Foundation
Projects
• makes government and public
sector information more available
and useful
• use and adapting open source
technologies that can be reused
Thanks for getting up early for the breakfast briefing :)
we’re a charity that focuses on practical projects, the first one republish daily proceedings in Federal parliament
planning alerts, a single site to for anyone to sign up to keep up to date with development applications in their local area. At the moment we’re just focused on development notices from local government
crowd sourcing the collection of political pamphleteering the federal election and ...
What ties all these sites together is that we’re making the political actions and decision making processes in Australia more transparent, and more useful to everyone. Specifically with OpenAustralia.org ...
we turn this site ... which contains alot of what you’d want to know about what the Federal government are up to on a day to day basis...
which is pretty dry, and you have to be quite committed to bother scrolling through pages of pdfs.. into
a site invites you to think about parliament by connecting with what your local representative is saying our your behalf and looking up subjects you have an interest in
it makes sense to look at the people who are in government, see their picture, and some basic information all together in the same place
theyworkforyou - openaustralia was adapted from a UK site, Theyworkforyou.com which now looks like this. The code is all open source, conveniently available for our reuse.
you shouldn’t need training to find out what people are talking about in parliament.
if you could actually get a straight answer ...
(a ‘104’ is a code for ‘the politician should answer the question’)
you have to know in what context it was said to find it, and use the advanced search.
so the information is available but not design for non specialist users
clearly see what they’re saying about subjects we’re interested in. and then sign up for an email alert to keep up to date with thinking on that subject, or at least how it’s being discussed at a Federal level.
You can also see one of the comments on this speech on the side
About 1/4 of our alerts come from .gov.au addresses. Although we rarely get a mention, we’re delighted that Senator Kate Lundy chose to include links to her speeches via our service.
the first 7 weeks or so, which covered the adaptation of the UK site and scrapers for a handful of councils’ data
the initial development time was 7 weeks, and included some planning authorities (see launch email for
the vast majority of the development time was in writing scrapers.
can even include those in another website, as they’ve done with .... initially the links in al
that’s true of all of our sites.
which means people can find content easily, this is our last week’s breakdown from electionleaflets.org.au, we understand this is fairly typical. For election leaflets this is all organic searches.
because today’s workshop sessions are in this area .. have a look at some of our stats, we’re open with those too. We’ve had more in kind support from Google than any other funding to date.
look at the calendar year, relates to parliamentary sitting days. can see that we have doubling of base level of traffic....
The parliamentary sittings start on Tuesday, and the hansard is published the next morning, at which time new email alerts go out. at the weekends people have better things to do. or so we thought
we launched the layar, which attracted quite a bit of attention, about a week later. We can see that as a result that ongoing traffic doubled as those new visitors signed up for alerts
implementing adwords doubled our traffic to openaustralia.org over the course of a month. because we’re a charity, we applied for an in kind grant from google who kindly provide adwords.
potentially this helps lots more scrapers get built without having to maintain them ourselves.
we’re asking you to upload leaflets from your electorate so that we, and future generations of Australians can have a better understanding of political material sent out by the candidates int the run up to this Federal Election. As of Wednesday night we had 468 leaflets (totalled over 600 about a week after the election)