OpenAustralia heads to Berlin eDemocracy UnConference

James Riley
Wednesday, 07 October 2009 11:59

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

Australian government 2.0 advocates from the OpenAustralia.org initiative have been invited to attend the eDemocracy Summit 2009 UnConference in Berlin next week to swap ideas on open access information.

OpenAustralia.org founders Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska confirmed funding for the Berlin eDemocracy Summit from UK-based online democracy project mySociety.org this week.

OpenAustralia.org used the mySociety theyworkforyou.com engine to build the OpenAustralia site, which provides easy, searchable access to Australian Government Hansard feeds – making Senate and House debates and discussions simpler and more palatable.

Both open source advocates with an interest in policy process, Landauer and Szuminski founded OpenAustralia as a not-for-profit with the support of community donations and support. It is developed by a team of volunteer programmers and democracy enthusiasts.

"Berlin is really a get together for all the people around the world that are building Government transparency web sites," Landauer said. "It’s pretty exciting. There are people from all over Europe, the US … all from open society initiatives and is a chance to share information."

Landauer, meanwhile, has hailed the release of the first tranche of public sector data sets by the Government 2.0 Taskforce that have been published as part of the taskforce’s MashUp competition.

"The specific data sets that they have released for the MashUp competition is an immensely important development," Landauer told iTWire.

"It's a small first step, and there is nothing particularly controversial in any of those data sets. But the competition and the way that those data sets get used should show Governments that this is a real thing – that if you open up data, people will make use of it."

"If that can be demonstrated through the competition that I think that could be very beneficial. That’s a very practical and straight forward way of demonstrating potential benefits," Landauer said.