Hacking OpenAustralia.org

Matthew Landauer@matthewlandauer

matthew@openaustralia.org

OpenAustralia.org is a non-partisan website run by a group of volunteers which aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their representatives in Parliament.

What is OpenAustralia?

Currently focusing on the Federal Hansard

Why the Hansard matters

The official website - what it looks like

http://www.aph.gov.au/

Remix

OpenAustralia.org

What's the point?

Many reasons.

Here's just one:

"...a global network of volunteers who

develop the Ubuntu Linux system..."

Google

Do the quickest thing

Focus on getting something up and running

Rewrite in more modern technologies later

Approach to building the site

Stop me and ask questions

Bits of technology

Operating System

FreeBSD - using donated VPS service from Octopus Computing (http://octopus.com.au)

Software Version Control

git

github.com - http://github.com/mlandauer

gitweb

gitosis

git-cvs

Deployment / Server Configuration

Capistrano

Chef (like Puppet)

Parser / Scraper

Ruby

Mechanize

Hpricot

Web application

Languages

• PHP

• A little Perl / Python (for database loading and maintenance scripts)

Web application

Apache

Xapian

• Doesn't require a daemon

• Requires manual reindexing

Bug database

Jira - thank you Atlassian

blog.openaustralia.org

Wordpress

Database

MySQL

phpmyadmin

Future

Very close to establishing

OpenAustralia Foundation

The Public Whip

Transcription of the Register of Interests

Contacting politicians

Committees

Written Answers

Some ideas for the future

Bills

States & Territories

Video

More historical Hansard

Lobbying register

Party donation records

Some ideas for the future

Work in progress

Get involved

Follow @openaustralia on twitter

Go to software.openaustralia.org

An announcement

In June

First OpenAustralia Hackfest!

Hack on the parser and the web app

Build something newusing the data / API

Hackfest!

Saturday June 6

Google Sydney

Stay tuned to @openaustralia, Google group openaustralia-dev or the SLUG announce list for more details

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sylvar/348629926/

Photo Credits

Questions