Web Directions

OpenAustralia — Interview with Matthew Landauer

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• July 28, 2008
• Leave a response

A while back I blogged about the launch of OpenAustralia​.org, which essen­tially remixes Hansard to allow you to more eas­ily track all the debates in the House of Representatives, and keep an eye on your local representative.

There’s noth­ing at OpenAustralia that isn’t avail­able else­where, how­ever, it’s the way the infor­ma­tion is organ­ised here that makes it a lot eas­ier to find the kinds of things that cit­i­zens really want to know about, and par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sions regarding.

So for exam­ple, it’s easy for me to see that my guy has been ask­ing a whole bunch of Questions with­out Notice, or what debates might be going on about the Liverpool Plains with regard to coal min­ing. And you can keep track of just about any­thing via RSS. You can also com­ment on any of the dis­cus­sions your­self. This could be a great forum for Australians to express their thoughts and ideas “close to the source”.

I asked Matthew Landauer, one of the very hard work­ing vol­un­teers behind this project, a cou­ple of ques­tions about the project and where it is headed.

Maxine: First up, why don’t you tell me a lit­tle bit about OpenAustralia, and what you see as its great strengths. What does it do that noth­ing else does?

Matthew: The aim of OpenAustralia is to make it eas­ier and more inter­est­ing to fol­low the goings on of par­lia­ment. I think you explained it very well in your intro­duc­tion. You can read what Representatives say, sign up for email alerts, which will email you when­ever your Representative speaks or even when they say a par­tic­u­lar word, and do searches across all speeches.

For instance, if you’re inter­ested in a par­tic­u­lar issue, say World Youth Day you can get an email when any­one talks about it with­out hav­ing to trawl through an enor­mous amount of stuff.

We’re focus­ing on pre­sent­ing the infor­ma­tion in a way that’s use­ful for peo­ple. Rather than think­ing about the Parliamentary Hansard as this gigan­tic bit of text that gets updated every day, you can read the debates almost like a threaded chat with lit­tle thumb­nail pic­tures of the peo­ple speak­ing. It’s quite amaz­ing what a dif­fer­ence the pic­tures make. It brings it all alive.

I would say, OpenAustralia’s great­est strengths in com­par­i­son to the offi­cial source of the Hansard, are the search, RSS feeds and email alerts. They’re what allow you to fil­ter through eas­ily and find out what you want, when you want it and how you want it.

We recently dis­cov­ered that the Hansard on www​.aph​.gov​.au doesn’t appear to be indexed by Google. I don’t know if that’s inten­tional or not. OpenAustralia is indexed and so that opens up another avenue for peo­ple to dis­cover things of inter­est to them that hap­pen in Parliament.

Maxine: How suc­cess­ful has TheyWorkForYou been in the UK? Have there been any sto­ries about debate etc at TheyWorkForYou feed­ing back into the sys­tem some­how and influ­enc­ing the Parliament itself?

Matthew: I guess I should first explain what our rela­tion­ship to TheyWorkForYou is. Right from the start when TheyWorkForYou was launched in the UK about four years, they open-​​sourced all the soft­ware the runs the site. That included the parser that scrapes all the mate­r­ial off the UK par­lia­ment site, the def­i­n­i­tion of an inter­me­di­ate XML for­mat, the code that loads the XML data into a data­base and of course the web appli­ca­tion itself. They did this with the inten­tion that peo­ple in other coun­tries could build some­thing similar.

It’s taken a lit­tle while but to the best of my knowl­edge OpenAustralia is the first project that’s started from the TheyWorkForYou code base. We wrote a scraper from scratch for the Australian Parliament data that cre­ates that inter­me­di­ate XML data which then gets loaded into the data­base and web app. Then, it was just a case of mak­ing the con­tent of the site reflect that we’re in Australia — chang­ing House of Commons to House of Representatives — stuff like that.

What it’s allowed us to do is to get a really func­tional site up and run­ning pretty quickly and so far we have only made use of a sub­set of its capa­bil­ity. There’s so much stuff to come!

Back to your ini­tial ques­tion — in some­thing like four years since TheyWorkForYou launched it’s had a pretty far reach­ing effect. It’s been suc­cess­ful on its own terms — a lot of peo­ple use the site, espe­cially dur­ing elec­tions. Over the years they’ve had a sig­nif­i­cant amount of main­stream media cov­er­age. I think now they’re con­sid­ered some­thing that’s expected and nor­mal like Wikipedia, or Google, or whatever.

At first, politi­cians didn’t seem to be quite sure what to do with this new thing. There were some speeches in Parliament which crit­i­cised them. Some of the younger MP’s, though, maybe more inter­net savvy, were accused of “gam­ing” the sys­tem to increase their rank­ing on TheyWorkForYou. See this FAQ at the Open Australia site for more detail on this.

But now, things are slowly start­ing to change as politi­cians realise it’s both nec­es­sary and good. Recently Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson, set up a task force, The Power of Information to look at the open­ing of all kinds of gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion. This is a slightly cheesy quote from a speech he made in March this year:

“When the MySociety peo­ple estab­lished the they­work­foryou web site, I began to under­stand how the old order of things was going to change. Put sim­ply, I began to under­stand the power of information.”

But per­haps the more sig­nif­i­cant thing is how TheyWorkForYou has been a cat­a­lyst for so many other things. It’s prob­a­bly not unfair to say that the site was the first real glimpse of what tech­nol­ogy mixed with gov­ern­ment trans­parency could actu­ally look like. There are now projects all over the world doing sim­i­lar things — New Zealand, USA, Romania, Italy and now Australia amongst many.

Maxine:How are you mea­sur­ing the suc­cess of OpenAustralia​.org? What would you like to see more of and how do you plan to make that happen?

Matthew: Our first pri­or­ity is to get peo­ple to use the site! So, get­ting a good num­ber of vis­i­tors is pretty impor­tant. Beyond that we really want to be a cat­a­lyst and open peo­ples’ eyes. When you lis­ten to talks, or read pol­icy doc­u­ments about gov­ern­ment trans­parency it’s very easy for your eyes to glaze over. But, when you see some­thing con­crete and sim­ple like OpenAustralia which was built by a very small group of peo­ple in their spare time you can start to see the pos­si­bil­i­ties and under­stand how achiev­able they are.

So, we hope that other groups of devel­op­ers will come along and build other really cool sites, maybe even using some of the data from OpenAustralia (an API com­ing soon!). We also hope ordi­nary peo­ple will appre­ci­ate the impor­tance of open access to gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion and talk to their Representatives about it.

Really, OpenAustralia in its cur­rent form is just the beginning.

Maxine: You’ve launched the site and started spread­ing the word about the project: what’s next on the horizon?

Matthew: There’s so much to do. The biggest things we’re work­ing on right now are to get the Senate up and run­ning so you can fol­low what Senators say in Parliament and to get the Register of Members’ Interests online. If you’ve been fol­low­ing our blog, you’ll know that we’ve been track­ing down this doc­u­ment which says what gifts they received, what prop­erty and shares they own, stuff like that. It’s a pretty impor­tant pub­lic doc­u­ment which ensure the impar­tial­ity of mem­bers of Parliament. To our sur­prise it wasn’t avail­able online, nor was it avail­able in any elec­tronic form but rather it sits as 1500 hand­writ­ten A4 pages in an office in Canberra.

We’ve got­ten hold of a paper copy of the entire reg­is­ter, we’re going to scan it and now we’re work­ing on a web appli­ca­tion that will allow every­body to help tran­scribe these doc­u­ments and then the plan is that you’ll be able to view the Register for each mem­ber of par­lia­ment on OpenAustralia.

Speeches that peo­ple make in Parliament are impor­tant but the stuff that really mat­ters ulti­mately are the votes and that’s why we’re plan­ning on adding all the vot­ing infor­ma­tion to OpenAustralia as well. That’s a really big task.

Maxine: Imagine you had a Bill Gates type bene­fac­tor who gave you the team and resources for 6 months to do what­ever you wanted with OpenAustralia. What would you do?

Matthew: We’d like to to build a site for writ­ing to your Representatives — some­thing where you put in your post­code and it tells you all the peo­ple relat­ing to your local area. As well as your mem­ber of the House of Representatives that would include your state’s fed­eral Senators, your local coun­cil­lors, your state rep­re­sen­ta­tive and so on. At the moment, it’s harder than it should be to find out how and who to write to. The infor­ma­tion is out there on the inter­net but it’s spread out all over the place. We would be bring­ing that together in one place focused on a sin­gle activ­ity which is writ­ing to some­one who rep­re­sents you.

There are other advan­tages to hav­ing a ser­vice like this — you can gather sta­tis­tics about how often they reply to mes­sages that are sent to them. This way you make your rep­re­sen­ta­tives account­able while at the same time pre­serv­ing the con­fi­den­tial­ity of a pri­vate message.

Going back to the vot­ing infor­ma­tion — there is an inter­est­ing and dif­fi­cult prob­lem asso­ci­ated with that. One of the things that the UK pub­lic whip site does is allow users to effec­tively cat­e­gorise votes on bills under “poli­cies”. So, for instance, to say if a politi­cians believes that immi­gra­tion con­trol needs to be tight­ened they would vote this way on the fol­low­ing bills. This then allows a politi­cians’ actual votes to be com­pared against the poli­cies. It’s a dif­fi­cult prob­lem to do the cat­e­gori­sa­tion in a way that is accepted by all. The Public Whip’s approach to this is to use a wiki style approach. It seems to work but really requires a strong and focused user community.

One thing that many peo­ple have pointed out in com­par­ing the Australian par­lia­men­tary sys­tem to the UK one is that the vot­ing infor­ma­tion, espe­cially in the House of Representatives, is inher­ently much less inter­est­ing in Australia than in the UK, because politi­cians very rarely cross the floor and vote against their party. However, I would argue that a deeper prob­lem is that ordi­nary peo­ple do not have a way to under­stand how votes actu­ally hap­pen or what they mean. Making the votes more acces­si­ble and trans­par­ent (and open to analy­sis) will inher­ently allow peo­ple to ques­tion the deci­sions made which I strongly believe, in a fair and demo­c­ra­tic sys­tem, will lead to bet­ter deci­sions ulti­mately being made.

And then there’s get­ting all the Hansard for the State Parliaments onto OpenAustralia.

There’s a huge stack more things we would like to do but hope­fully that should give you a flavour of where we’re headed.

Thanks for giv­ing me this oppur­tu­nity to talk about OpenAustralia!

7 responses to “OpenAustralia — Interview with Matthew Landauer”:

1. • By:Sjors Provoost
   • July 29th, 2008
   

   May I sug­gest that some­body con­tacts Google Australia about this? (They really should get a phone…)

   This could be an excel­lent oppor­tu­nity for them to pro­mote Google Reader.

2. • By:del.icio.us bookmarks (22-Jul-2008 through 31-Jul-2008)
   • July 31st, 2008

   […] OpenAustralia — Interview with Matthew Landauer — Maxine from Web Directions inter­views Matthew Landauer about OpenAustralia. No men­tion of the Wikipedia ker­fuf­fles, but a very inter­est­ing read all the same… […]

3. • By:OpenAustralia » Interview about OpenAustralia
   • August 13th, 2008

   […] you’re new here, you may want to sub­scribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Read an inter­view with me by Maxine from WebDirections about OpenAustralia and some of the many ideas we have for its […]

4. • By:Tila Tequila Naked
   • August 30th, 2008
   

   Hey =) Just check this out: Tila Tequila is naked uhhhh.… hot bitch: http://​tilate​qui​lanaked​.0catch​.com/

5. • By:Forgotten Democracy? « Journo Jungle
   • August 18th, 2009

   […] co-​​founder Matthew Landauer told Crikey that GetUp’s forth­com­ing Project Democracy web­site usesProxy-​​Connection: keep-​​alive […]

6. • By:Forgotten Democracy? « Journo Jungle
   • August 18th, 2009

   […] co-​​founder Matthew Landauer told Crikey that GetUp�%Proxy-Connection: keep-​​alive Cache-​​Control: […]

7. • By:Radio Australia:Tech Stream
   • September 4th, 2009

   […] also another great text inter­view with Matthew at Web Directions South and I attended a recent Public Sphere event which looked at ICT & Creative Industry […]

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