Open Australia morph.io workshop: learn to scrape open data from any web site

Special guest Henare Degan from the Open Australia Foundation is making a special trip down from Sydney to talk about some of Australia's most successful open data and transparency initiatives.

PlanningAlerts (https://www.planningalerts.org.au/) scrapes council websites to inform you about planning applications in your area. They Vote for You (http://www.theyvoteforyou.org.au/) makes it trivial to understand how MPs vote in parliament while OpenAustralia (http://www.openaustralia.org.au/) lets you dive deeper behind the arcane parliamentary processes. Right to Know (https://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/projects/right-to-know)is a fantastic FOI service, while Election Leaflets (https://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/projects/election-leaflets/) takes transparency and open data to the election leafletting process.

But, perhaps most exciting is morph.io (https://morph.io/): a sophisticated, mature, multi-platform web scraper that powers several of their services - and is available to help you build your own open data or transparency website. Bring your laptop!

6:00: official start, mingling.

6:20: Henare introduces Open Australia Foundation, and the stories behind these awesome projects.

6:50 Hands on morph.io workshop - how to add a scraper to add your own council to PlanningAlerts

7:30 Light snacks and drinks

8:00 Continue working on your own scraper or explore the OAF projects.

9:00 End

Notes

Please read our code of conduct (http://au.okfn.org/get-involved/code-of-conduct/) and make sure to abide by it.

Please arrive no earlier than 5:30PM (to avoid disrupting ThoughtWorks employees).

The meetup officially opens at 6PM, and there will be somebody to let people upstairs until about 6:15.
If you arrive after 6:15, you'll need to call and someone will let you in.

There will be some snacks provided; we try to make sure that we cover vegan and gluten free.
If you have specific needs, or feel like bringing something to share, please bring some food.