Blog

Exploring Trove

This week the Melbourne meetup was fortunate to be joined (virtually) by Dr Tim Sherratt (@wragge), who shared with us some of his vast knowledge of Trove. Hanging out, waiting to join the @OKFNau meet up in Melbourne. If the technology behaves… — Tim Sherratt (@wragge) April 8, 2015 Dr Sherratt is a self-described digital […]

Public Transport Victoria release data in GTFS format

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 […]

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. […]

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. […]

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 […]

Weekly Open Knowledge meetings

In late November, after experiencing both GovHack and HealthHack – annual weekend gatherings designed to bring data owners and computer imagineers together to help each other – I put forward the idea of a weekly meetup to the Melbourne team. Inspired by the Hack weekends, but disappointed as a full time worker at my own […]

HealthHack 2014: the story of a bar chart

Everybody knows that the start of the pipeline in life sciences is full of women. Everybody knows the people who get grants are senior male researchers. It’s a lot easier to explain with pictures.

Open mapping tools and self-referential post-irony, together at last

Right, so, this is an upcycled information disseminator made on an open tech stack. Crowdsourced data points, yeah. Where from? The People. Us. All of us. Everyone contributed. We just, know, got together over beers and… Glenn made icons – you know Glenn, he’s got those pants, and that guy with the beard – no, […]