This week’s Melbourne meet was very much focused on the news this week that Public Transport Victoria have met their goal of releasing the timetable data in the General Transit Feed Specification, or GTFS. GTFS was originally specified by Google but has quickly become a defacto standard across the world. PTV already provides some timetable […]
Shut up and Hack, 25 March
This week there was definitely hacking, and more than a bit of yacking. New people and regulars, were in part of the crowd. Playing with words A few weeks ago, there was a presentation on the data that has been made available by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profit Commission (ACNC Registered Charities, ACNC Annual Information […]
Board Meeting – 31 March 2015
BOARD MEETING Tuesday 31 March 2015 11.00AM – 12.00PM Location: Google hangouts Attendees: Nicholas Gruen (Chairman) Dr. Fiona Tweedie (Co-Chair) Dr. Maia Sauren (Co-Chair) Ana Mihov-Nicotodis (Co-Secretary) Steven De Costa (Board Member) Anne Cregan-Wolfe (Board Member) Michael Phillips (Board Member) Apologies: James Kliemt (Board Member) David Flanders (Co-Secretary) AGENDA Welcome from the Chair Apologies Changes […]
Giselle Sperber, Code for America Fellow
Tonight we heard from Giselle Sperber, 2014 Code for America fellow who’s finishing up a brief stint with the Victorian Government. Code for America is a pretty remarkable non-profit expanding across the US, and now the world. The model pairs teams of three (usually a designer, a front-end developer, and a database/back end developer) with […]
Open Weather Data with the Weather Chaser
Tonight at Open Knowledge Melbourne, John Barratt gave us an overview of all the open weather data available. John runs a few sites, including TrendsMap (commercial services identifying patterns in Twitter data), The Weather Chaser (a decade’s worth of official weather data, with interesting analysis and discovery interfaces), and Will I Get Wet, a localised rain predictor. […]
How much Gov would a GovHack hack if a GovHack could hack Gov
I think the correct answer is that a GovHack would hack so much Gov they wouldn’t know how much Gov they hacked. Although the 2014 GovHack the annual report attempts to cover the answer in a little more detail. The answer for 2015 will come to light on the weekend of 3 July and the National GovHack […]
Melbourne OK Weekly
Last night Ross Gillott from the Australian Charities and Not for Profits Commission joined us to explain their dataset. It was a very interesting presentation, there is so much potential in the data they have. After being separated from the ATO in 2012, the data that the ACNC was provided was scrappy and poorly kept. […]
Seven Principles of a 21st Century Government
As part of International Open Data Day (IODD) the folks at Code for Australia organised a Sydney based workshop designed to discuss ‘Principles of a 21st Century Government’. This was one of three activities highlighted by Open Knowledge Australia ahead of IODD, so we followed up to see how it went. There is now a detailed post up […]
Melbourne OK weekly
We are still finding our feet at the weekly Melbourne OKau meet ups. But after roughly two months of regular meetings it’s fair to say we have momentum and a regular turn-out of about fifteen people. OKMelb have decided on a format of sorts. Every other week, if possible, we will have a domain expert […]
Australian Activities on International Open Data Day, 21 February
International Open Data day falls on 21 February and there will be a range of practical ways people can help out within an Australian context. Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and […]