OpenAustralia volunteers drive Gov2.0 access

James Riley
Tuesday, 04 August 2009 08:00

Business IT - Technology

The Australian Parliament’s register of interests, where senators and House members declare gifts and shareholdings, is now published online. But don’t try to find the documents on the parliamentary website.

It took the volunteer efforts of an open source development team with an interest in making the public record more accessible to get the hardcopy documents out of a registrar’s office and onto the internet.

Before OpenAustralia.org began publishing the register of interests earlier this year, the only way to access the information was to present your self in person at the registrar’s office inside Parliament House and make the request.

And even then, the register was not allowed to be removed from the office.

OpenAustralia.org is to the Australian democratic process what open source software is to the tech sector. It takes publicly available information – Hansard transcripts primarily – and publishes it in a searchable, easily accessible form.

Founded a little more than a year ago, OpenAustralia has been developed by a team of volunteer programmers and enthusiasts – about five people are at its core, but as many as 50 have helped push the site forward.

The site passed an important milestone last month when its founders Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska and others established a not-for-profit organisation to create for OpenAustralia a sustainable model to expand its information services.

The organisation last week applied for a $20,000 grant through auDA Foundation to pursue a sustainable business model that will enable it to pay for two or three programmers full time to keep the site functional and relevant.

Most information on the OpenAustralia is already available through aph.gov.au. But it is more difficult to search, doesn’t allow email alerts or RSS feeds.

It is the ease of use that makes the site increasingly a destination of choice for people who watch the machinery of government closely. But it is the story of how the Register of Interests came to be on the site that is instructive about its development.

Landauer said the volunteer group felt the register was important public domain information and simply made the request for copies to the Department of the House of Representatives and the Department of the Senate without knowing the rules and processes that were applied to the documents.

“It took a few months, and we had to wait,” Landauer told iTWire. “The whole process was mired in different levels of gray.”

“When we asked for copies of the register to scan, we simply asked for permission, and asked what the copyright treatment of the register was,” he said.

“We weren’t ever given explicit permission to publish, and we weren’t told what the copyright treatment of the register was. But the registrars for both the register in the House and Senate sent us copies of the documents with full knowledge of what we planned to do with them and we took that to mean implicitly that permission was granted.”

“We kept asking and we kept pushing and eventually it happened. We understand that there were committee meetings that discussed the issue, but we don’t actually know what happened behind the scenes.”

“But it is so important that this kind of information be easily accessible to the public … it’s very basic.”

Landauer, a programmer/academic by training, has been living on savings for the past nine months, effectively working on OpenAustralia.org fulltime. An American citizen with Australian residency, he says his commitment to the program is driven by “a healthy interest in the democratic process.”

The plan, he says, is to become an Australian citizen before the next election, he says.