Please note that the deadline for updates is the 20th of September so we’d really appreciate some help over this week.

The video also covers information about the state level and local government level indexes. Submissions for these can be received at any time and the process is just as easy as that of the global census.

You can follow Australian developments around this project on Twitter.

Note: This is a re-post on behalf of Rosie Williams. The original post can be found at https://openaus.net.au/blog/2015/08/17/open-data-open-government-a-new-paradigm/

The internet is often hailed for its promise and role played in political change. Now anyone can blog or Tweet. Social media has played a major role in democratic uprisings around the world and ending political careers domestically. Likewise, open data is a new tool available to citizens in getting access to information that was previously kept under lock and key, to reveal insights not previously available even to government and provide another level of accountability of the government to the people. The term used to refer to this expectation and process is ‘open government‘.

In our modern democracies with governments now reaching into every corner of our lives, providing cradle to grave services as the largest employer/contractor in the country, we have come to expect a great deal from government. In recent years, the advent of the internet has brought with it an assumption that our power as individual citizens will increase and that this will mean a lessening of the power and control held by government and an increase in the power of the individual.

There is much written about the expectations on government but there is a corollary to theincreased engagement and participation projected by open government, specifically, an increase in the burden of responsibility must logically flow from the government back to the people.

Open data plays a role in this process of changing the relationship between citizens and government but this change must also transpire at the level of individual consciousness.

The more disconnected we feel from the democratic and policy process, the more we are inclined to blame the government for the ills we see. As citizen engagement and participation increases, the more power we should have over the outcomes – both good and bad. Increasing the power and responsibility of citizens is good for government as citizens (with the help of government) take more responsibility for solving problems. The role of government shifts from being the solution to every problem to being the facilitator of communities solving their problems. This is a paradigmatic shift.

I believe that  open government heralds a new paradigm in modern politics, one where governments are no longer seen as the be all and end all in solving every problem but are seen as facilitators of our collective insights and abilities in solving our problems. Open data has an important role in open government in increasing transparency and accountability but it is up to us to engage with the government over open data and support open data projects for the very important role they play in empowering citizens with information they need to hold the government to account.

Staff from VicRoads, who are running the hackfest and provided refreshments for the launch, were there in force. Brent from HERE Maps showed the incredible range of services available through the HERE Developer portal, which is open to anyone throughout the hackfest. Airbus are providing access to high resolution satellite imagery, available through a range of geospatial services – see the hackfest page for the details. And What3Words provides an alternative, simpler location service in which any location on earth can be specified with three words.

Full details of the competion are at www.geonext.com.au/hackfest.

Steve Bennett’s slides with a summary are here.

This goal became a larger deal for me when I tried to download some geospatial data from DELWP on the GovHack weekend, only to find that I had to download it via the Spatial Datamart, which was sporadically inaccessible, and which had a delay on delivering the link to the downloadable data to my email inbox (Apparently the Data Vic custodians made this clear via Twitter several days in advance, but I guess I missed the memo). This would have been a fine platform when the data was being used almost exclusively by internal government departments who were happy to wait a couple of days for the data to appear, but for somebody starting a hackathon and needing access to the data right now to start his project, this is somewhat of a pain. To be clear, I don’t blame the data owners for not providing a better access to the data; they’ve got limited resources, and anything they can give us is better than nothing, but I think it’s important to make clear to the community that they’ll have to deal with these hurdles so they know ahead of time, and also highlight which data owners it’s most worthwhile offering help to in order to make their data more accessible.

Anyway, with all the amazing speakers we’ve had at our meetups, as well as the preparation for GovHack, this plan kind of fell by the way site. Now though, we’ve got some time, and I suggested that in future we could perhaps allocate just 10 or 15 minutes of most nights to each picking a data set or two, trying to download it and having a quick look to decide on its integrity. So in an attempt to just get the ball rolling, I’ve created a Google Docs Spreadsheet to start listing some of the slightly more tricky data sets. Ideally the findings from this spreadsheet can, and should, be added as comments to each data set, but I figured a central location for us to contribute to to begin with was a good start. Currently the document requires specific permission for users to edit it; I’m not sure whether it’s worth allowing the entire world to make edits to it. In any case, if you want access, you can click the Share button in the top-right corner and press the Request Access link in the bottom-right of the pop-up to request edit access from me.

This is a best-effort work in progress, and I’ve no idea how it’ll go, but let’s give it a shot!

A collection of session recordings are provided below.

• Above – Nicholas Gruen: Chair of Open Knowledge Australia

• Above- Pia Waugh: Director of Analytics and Discovery Layer, Digital Transformation Office

• Above – Maree Adshead: CEO, Open Data Institute Queensland

All Speakers:

• Nicholas Gruen: Chair of Open Knowledge Australia
• Jed Sundwall: Global Open Data Technical BDM for Amazon Web Services
• Pia Waugh:  Director of Analytics and Discovery Layer, Digital Transformation Office
• Steve Bennett: Community Contributor, Open Knowledge Australia
• Steven De Costa: Open Knowledge Australia, CKAN Association and Link Digital
• Brendan Bouffler: Scientific Computing, Amazon Web Services
• Maree Adshead: CEO, Open Data Institute Queensland

Thanks to everyone who came along for this event!

Special thanks to Amazon Web Services and Link Digital for covering costs associated with the room hire, catering and social drinks.

@piawaugh and @NGruen1 Will Work For Data #WeAreCKAN at the @okfnau #CBR drinks. MOAR #opendata pic.twitter.com/wFikWO83SH

— Steven De Costa (@starl3n) May 13, 2015

Ruth presents the data from the City of Greater Geelong

Alisha presents her work from the City of Melbourne

Rosie present the City of Ballarat data

This week’s OK Melbourne saw Ruth, Alisha and Rosie spoke to us about the data sets that are coming out of the Cities of Melbourne, Greater Geelong and Ballarat for the upcoming GovHack. There looks to be some very rich data coming out of each of the sites, with both interesting cultural and geographical data, some lighter census data as well as the usual tough stuff – fines, roads, parking. Each of the cities will be presenting a range of prizes, the City of Melbourne will hopefully also be hosting a 3D printing micro site – raising the question “how would you use City of Melbourne data in 3D printed form?”.

Jordan also gave greater context to GovHack – what our aims and goals were with the project, what other data sets would be available, what project we expected and wanted to see come out of the weekend. Next week is the Mapping workshop with our own Steve Bennett and we have confirmed Andrew Phillips from Splunk as a speaker at the June 10th workshop.

Finally, a short reminder that the Melbourne GovHack team are very keen to provide child care at this year’s GovHack, and if that’s of interest to you they ask if you could take their four question survey about what type of child care service you would want.

Learn about the foundation elements of a new information economy that is already connecting public and private sectors throughout Australia and the world.

Tickets are available via Eventbrite

Confirmed Speakers:

• Nicholas Gruen: Chair of Open Knowledge Australia
• Jed Sundwall: Global Open Data Technical BDM for Amazon Web Services
• Pia Waugh:  Director of Analytics and Discovery Layer, Digital Transformation Office
• Steve Bennett: Community Contributor, Open Knowledge Australia
• Steven De Costa: Open Knowledge Australia, CKAN Association and Link Digital
• Brendan Bouffler: Scientific Computing, Amazon Web Services
• Maree Adshead: CEO, Open Data Institute Queensland

Formal agenda will run from 2:30pm to 4:30pm.

Networking and drinks to close from 4:30 to 5:30pm

Taking place at NICTA Canberra Research Laboratory, 7 London Circuit, Canberra, ACT 2601

PTV already provides some timetable through a restricted timetable API. Since this data set rarely changes – it’s not a live dataset, but the static, day to day timetable data – it makes more sense to have it all available.

And now it is – you can grab it from data.vic.gov.au. (Mac users will need to download 7zip – the command line unzip doesn’t work apparently)

Neil from PTV gave a quick explanation of the processes they are going through with the Google team to get the data integrated into Google Maps – a process that may take 3 to 6 months. There is also a push for better live data from trams and buses in the near future. The work they are doing at PTV to open their data is excellent and we can’t congratulate them enough for their efforts – and for listening to the community.

In the meantime, we can have at it. There were a couple of teams looking into getting the data into already existing open source apps to deliver a quicker service than that provided by Google, and at least one attempt to do a holistic analysis of service by suburb analysis. Expect to see some of those results here over the next few weeks.

We were also lucky enough to informally find out about a new temporal map of Australia with some funky data sets from newcomer Matt – look out for his presentation on April 29th about what he’s done and how he got his data. And Steve showed off opentrees.org, a map of council-managed trees in Victoria, created by combining 7 different council open data datasets.

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 Statement 2013). They have released the data that has been reported by more than 40,000 registered organisations. This is data set contains a mix of data types – text, numbers, booleans, and not all records are complete or clean.

The text components of this ACNC data set were an opportunity to try out an online word cloud generator, Tagxedo. This is similar to Wordle, with more controls to use on the text data.

Before doing anything with text, especially free text, it needs to be cleaned. Cleaning text involves removing common words (stop words) and grouping words with common stems (stemming and lemmatisation) – and take up a lot of time with not much to show for it. Stopping, stemming and lemmatisation are all component of natural language processing algorithms. This is a whole area of study within many universities.

What is a word cloud and why use one?

A word cloud is a visual representation of the text data – the text is broken into individual words, the frequency of each word is displayed in different colours and/or sizes.

The display of any analysis results is usually a table and a chart. Open any annual report, white paper, government report, research paper, article, or thesis – tables and charts galore. A word cloud will add interest to an otherwise boring report – particularly when it is difficult to add a photo or image. It will stand out from other assignments, other reports, other presentations.

What’s in a name?

Below is a word cloud analysis of the names of the charities, created using Tagxedo. This shows the most prevalent words that are in the names of the charities. Notice that the words appear in different sizes, this indicates how often the word appears – more frequently appearing words are larger.

The stopping and stemming process was performed by Tagxedo. The word list was cleaned further by removing some additional words like, ‘St’, which would not add value. The number of words to appear was restricted to the 100. This was easily configured in the word | layout options menus.

The name of charities can also include a description of what they are or do. The word cloud shows that a large number of schools and churches are charities; different Christian denominations can be seen. Foundations, associations, trustees and trust also feature amongst the most frequent.

How much do charities and not-for-profits care?

This next word cloud was generated from the activity description information provided.

This word cloud show the top 200 words used by charities and not-for-profits to describe how they pursued their main activities. After Tagxedo removed stop-words, additional words were removed, (e.g. ‘including’).

So, how much do charities and not-for-profits care? Not as much about activities, services, community, education, people, meetings and support.

Resources

https://data.gov.au/dataset/acnc-register

http://www.tagxedo.com

http://www.wordle.net/

Sally Pryor

@pryor365

The fellows work on incredibly varied projects, from redesigning crappy forms, to creating GTFS feeds from public transport data, to building Discover BPS, an easy to use school selection system for parents. Giselle, a user experience designer/researcher, was working with Chattanooga, Tennessee, but based in San Francisco, where CfA also provides training and ongoing support to fellows. Most recently she’s been embedded with the Victorian Government’s Department of Premier and Cabinet, working on a potential redesign of the vic.gov.au platform.

There’s lots of information and the odd YouTube video about Giselle’s activities at the Chattanooga Code for America page. If you’re interested in helping get this model working in Australia, get in touch with codeforaustralia.org.

Giselle’s slides: “Working Together Works“