Hackfest - GLOW Edition

The OpenAustralia Foundation (http://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/) is pleased to invite you to another one of our legendary hackfests. In some of our previous hackfests we've opened PlanningAlerts (http://www.planningalerts.org.au/) to over 1.8 million more Australians (https://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2011/09/15/little-openaustralia-hackfest-big-results/) and brought hacks and hackers together (https://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2012/11/05/youre-invited-to-our-freedom-of-information-hacksfest/) to launch our Freedom of Information project Right To Know (https://www.righttoknow.org.au/).

This time we're going back to the old school and will be concentrating on opening parliaments, politicians and elections. Our event is timed to coincide with the Global Legislative Openness Week (http://openparl2014.org/) (GLOW). This week sees events hosted by the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership (http://opengovpartnership.org/) and events like ours hosted by members of the parliamentary openness community around the world.

As usual we’re inviting anyone interested in open government, not just developers, along to our event that will run on the weekend of the 20th and 21st of September 2014. Once again we’re being generously hosted by Google Sydney.

While you’re welcome to come along and work on anything you’d like, here’s some ideas to get you started:

• Sprucing up OpenAustralia.org (http://www.openaustralia.org/) or adding new features
• Features like expenses data for our federal politicians
• Or maybe transcribing their financial interests into a database
• Visualising party preferences (https://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2013/08/26/an-experiment-in-visualising-preferences/)
• Writing scrapers on morph.io (https://morph.io/) to liberate more parliamentary data

Oh, we’ll also be providing special access to our latest project (https://www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2014/03/31/parliamentary-vote-tracker-project-what-we-are-doing-and-why/) that allows you to analyse votes in our federal parliament!

This is roughly what the weekend will look like:

Saturday
10:30 - Doors open
11:00 - Introduction and talk(s)
12:30 - (Free!) Lunch, chat and meet people to work with
13:00 - People have eaten and found something and someone to work with
17:00 - Pack up and have a drink somewhere
Sunday
10:30 - Doors open and hacking starts
12:30 - Lunch
15:00 - Show and tell
16:00 - Grab another well deserved beer

We hope to see you there :)