OpenAustralia.org is live!
Around 8:30pm last night @katska announced that OpenAustralia is now live and open to the public. There was a flurry of discussion on Twitter about it; some people reported a few minor issues with the deployment which @matthewlandauer was able to fix right away. It is a beta release - so there are still some outstanding issues that will be resolved over the coming weeks.
OpenAustralia is a site that aggregates House of Representatives debates with data about the Members of the House of Reps and presents it in a way that makes it easy to see what debates your Member in your electorate is participating, what they’re saying and whether they’re doing a good job of representing you. You can see statistics of how many debates they’ve been involved with. You can comment against any Member’s contribution to a debate and discuss that with other users of the site.
Up until now this information has been available through the published Hansards but hasn’t been very useful or easy to read. That has now changed with the launch of OpenAustralia. There is no longer any excuse for not getting involved in Federal politics!
As for as my contribution: I came in towards the end of the project as I only heard about OpenAustralia at BarCampCanberra and couldn’t actually find out any information on it until Shoaib mentioned it in response to my blog post in follow-up to my meeting with Justin Kerr-Stevens where I mentioned TheyWorkForYou. So I did a bit of beta testing and am currently working on CSS and HTML tweaks to give the site its own stand-alone branding instead of looking identical to TWFY. Those visual and IA changes should be released sometime this week.
Go and register an account now, have a look around and participate in the discussions. Stay tuned - more features and data sources coming soon!
You are expected to register and post comments under your own real name. If you don’t feel comfortable with that because you don’t want to be associated with your own view and opinions, well maybe you should consider what you’re afraid of. If you don’t feel comfortable with posting under your real name for fear of repercussions and consequences from your employer (especially if you work for the Australia Government like myself) then don’t be. Regardless of who you work for you are still a citizen of the Commonwealth of Australia and have a right to express your own opinion without fear. Any discrimination that results from you commenting on OpenAustralia.org and discussing debates and speeches is illegal.
This is a free country … but if you choose to voluntarily retract your rights and boundaries of your freedoms then you’re just making it easier for your rights to be taken away, so exercise them while you still can!
Anyway - it’s up to you. For technical information you can go have a look at Matthew’s presentation from the recent Rails meet-up in Sydney.
I also posted about the OpenAustralia.org launch on the Norg and at Aussie Bloggers; I’ve also lined up a guest blogging spot on Aussie Bloggers for a more in-depth piece sometime soon where I’ll also hopefully be able to interview Kat and Matthew about the project.
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
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