Sydney Hackfest 2009 Was Amazing!

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Henare Degan

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Jun 14, 2009, 1:16:09 AM6/14/09
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Hi all,

Thanks to everyone that attended yesterday's hackfest, what a fantastic day! It was really great to meet you all, learn some things, hopefully help others, and see the work that came out of the day.

The day kicked off just after midday with Matthew giving us a run down of how we can get involved and contribute to OpenAustralia (see below for a reminder). After that, the 40-strong participants worked in groups on projects they were interested, fix bugs or just get their heads around how the OA code works.

My personal experience was helping people get the code up-and-running in their development environment so they can see how it works and hopefully start contributing. There were quite a few questions during the day so if you're stuck on anything or have any questions, don't forget to send a mail to this list. There's a bunch of people ready to help you, and we're bound to learn something along the way too!

Projects

I didn't get a chance to speak to all the people working on projects during the day and so I'm really hoping people in those groups can reply to this mail with a few sentences about what you did during the day, any new opportunities you found or any problems you ran into:
  • OA-277 Set up of open source video infrastructure for publishing Ogg Theora/Vorbis video in HTML5 video tag (Silvia Pfeiffer)
  • OA-178 Wordpress plugin – Sherif worked on this. You can track progress here.
  • OA-280 iPhone version of FixMyStreet clone – Jake worked on this with Nat and Chris
  • OA-195 Register of Members’ Interests Data Entry Tool (RMIDET) – Keiran worked on this with Tim.
  • OA-250 Capitol Words equivalent… only with phrase support, weighted with “unlikely occurrence of words together” statistic. Mary Gardiner
  • MP Contact Details scrapers for obtaining MP contact details from other States
Even if you weren't in one of these groups, please don't hesitate to write up your experiences, send them to this list, blog or tweet about them (and send us a link!).

Statistics

During the day we had:
  • Five total commits, two to the web application and three to the parser
  • Nine issues in total updated in the bug tracker, with four issues resolved
  • A number of new developers added to the bug tracker so there's now over 10 people that can update tickets
There's a lot more effort that's not in these numbers that hopefully will be coming out in the days ahead as people start releasing their results from the day.

Pretty impressive for a first effort I think, as Matthew says, "Give yourself a big pat on the back!" :)

Get Involved

Matthew gave a great introduction where he reminded us of how we can all get involved:
Thanks again to the core organisers, Matthew, Kat and Sarah for initiating such an excellent event, thanks to Google, Tim and James for an excellent venue and facilities but thanks most of all to everyone that came and made it the great day it was.

Cheers,

Henare

PS. Don't forget to tag your photos and tweets about the day oah09 so we can find them
PPS. We'll be posting this summary to our development blog once the projects send in their updates, so please get them in as soon as you can
PPPS. Apologies for the HTML mail but it seems to be OK on this mailing list. Feel free to flame me if not :)

Rob Manson

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Jun 14, 2009, 1:35:17 AM6/14/09
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Hey Henare,

sorry I didn't get a chance to meet you yesterday.

After fighting with my php installation (grumble) I made some good
progress on the mobile version of OpenAustralia.org.

http://tickets.openaustralia.org/browse/OA-276

I've got the device detection working at the apache conf level and have
cut down index.php to be more relevant for mobile devices (e.g. simpler
css/layout and only 10 items in "recent debates" summaries, etc.).

I'm working on the search results pages and a few other simple pages and
should be able to check that in or supply a diff in a couple of days.

FYI: The files that will be updated are:

openaustralia/twfy/conf/httpd.conf
openaustralia/twfy/www/docs/mobile.php
openaustralia/twfy/www/docs/iphone.php
openaustralia/twfy/www/docs/style/default/mobile.css
openaustralia/twfy/www/docs/style/default/global_non_ns4_mobile.css
openaustralia/twfy/www/includes/easyparliament/page.php
openaustralia/twfy/www/includes/easyparliament/skin.php
openaustralia/twfy/www/includes/utility.php

I'll update the ticket when I'm ready to check some stuff in.


Yesterday was amazing...I couldn't believe how great the turn-out was!


--
Rob Manson
m: +61 423 215 731
e: roB...@MOBusiness.com.au
l: http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertmanson
t: http://twitter.com/nambor
s: http://slideshare.net/robman


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't miss our presentation on Pervasive Computing
and Business Strategy at Web Directions South 2009
http://south09.webdirections.org/program/business#pervasive-computing

----------------------------------------------------------------------


MOB is an Innovation Lab for Mobile & Online Business
MOB : Innovations that get you MO'Business
http://MOBusiness.com.au




On Sun, 2009-06-14 at 15:16 +1000, Henare Degan wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Thanks to everyone that attended yesterday's hackfest, what a
> fantastic day! It was really great to meet you all, learn some things,
> hopefully help others, and see the work that came out of the day.
>
> The day kicked off just after midday with Matthew giving us a run down
> of how we can get involved and contribute to OpenAustralia (see below
> for a reminder). After that, the 40-strong participants worked in
> groups on projects they were interested, fix bugs or just get their
> heads around how the OA code works.
>
> My personal experience was helping people get the code up-and-running
> in their development environment so they can see how it works and
> hopefully start contributing. There were quite a few questions during
> the day so if you're stuck on anything or have any questions, don't
> forget to send a mail to this list. There's a bunch of people ready to
> help you, and we're bound to learn something along the way too!
>
> Projects
>
> I didn't get a chance to speak to all the people working on projects
> during the day and so I'm really hoping people in those groups can
> reply to this mail with a few sentences about what you did during the
> day, any new opportunities you found or any problems you ran into:
> * OA-277 Set up of open source video infrastructure for
> publishing Ogg Theora/Vorbis video in HTML5 video tag (Silvia
> Pfeiffer)
> * OA-178 Wordpress plugin – Sherif worked on this. You can track
> progress here.
> * OA-280 iPhone version of FixMyStreet clone – Jake worked on
> this with Nat and Chris
> * OA-195 Register of Members’ Interests Data Entry Tool (RMIDET)
> – Keiran worked on this with Tim.
> * OA-250 Capitol Words equivalent… only with phrase support,
> weighted with “unlikely occurrence of words together”
> statistic. Mary Gardiner
> * MP Contact Details scrapers for obtaining MP contact details
> from other States
> Even if you weren't in one of these groups, please don't hesitate to
> write up your experiences, send them to this list, blog or tweet about
> them (and send us a link!).
>
> Statistics
>
> During the day we had:
> * Five total commits, two to the web application and three to
> the parser
> * Nine issues in total updated in the bug tracker, with four
> issues resolved
> * A number of new developers added to the bug tracker so there's
> now over 10 people that can update tickets
> There's a lot more effort that's not in these numbers that hopefully
> will be coming out in the days ahead as people start releasing their
> results from the day.
>
> Pretty impressive for a first effort I think, as Matthew says, "Give
> yourself a big pat on the back!" :)
>
> Get Involved
>
> Matthew gave a great introduction where he reminded us of how we can
> all get involved:
> * Sign-up to the Dev Mailing List -
> http://groups.google.com.au/group/openaustralia-dev/
> * If you're getting this email, you already are signed
> up, so please forward this to others that were at the
> hackfest that might not have got around to it
> * Download the software that runs OpenAustralia -
> http://software.openaustralia.org/
> * Check the trouble tickets in our bug tracker to find things to
> fix or new things to build - http://tickets.openaustralia.org/
> * Edit our development wiki at github -
> http://wiki.github.com/mlandauer/openaustralia
> * Follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/OpenAustralia

Henare Degan

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Jun 14, 2009, 1:49:36 AM6/14/09
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Hi Rob,

Thanks very much for the quick reply and wow, the progress on your mobile version sounds great! I can't wait to see the commits coming out soon. I think this might open up other opportunities in the mobile area for us to explore. Very cool.

I'll make sure this detail gets added to our blog post about the day.

Cheers,

Henare

Silvia Pfeiffer

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Jun 14, 2009, 3:44:39 AM6/14/09
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On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Henare Degan<henare...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Thanks to everyone that attended yesterday's hackfest, what a fantastic day!
> It was really great to meet you all, learn some things, hopefully help
> others, and see the work that came out of the day.
>
> The day kicked off just after midday with Matthew giving us a run down of
> how we can get involved and contribute to OpenAustralia (see below for a
> reminder). After that, the 40-strong participants worked in groups on
> projects they were interested, fix bugs or just get their heads around how
> the OA code works.
>
> My personal experience was helping people get the code up-and-running in
> their development environment so they can see how it works and hopefully
> start contributing. There were quite a few questions during the day so if
> you're stuck on anything or have any questions, don't forget to send a mail
> to this list. There's a bunch of people ready to help you, and we're bound
> to learn something along the way too!
>
> Projects
>
> I didn't get a chance to speak to all the people working on projects during
> the day and so I'm really hoping people in those groups can reply to this
> mail with a few sentences about what you did during the day, any new
> opportunities you found or any problems you ran into:
>
> OA-277 Set up of open source video infrastructure for publishing Ogg
> Theora/Vorbis video in HTML5 video tag (Silvia Pfeiffer)

<..>

> Even if you weren't in one of these groups, please don't hesitate to write
> up your experiences, send them to this list, blog or tweet about them (and
> send us a link!).

I've not got very far with this yet. I was planning on putting a Ogg
Theora/Vorbis video into a page, probably Kate Lundy's page, and
providing all the necessary javascript for it. But in the end I just
registered and installed the web software, got it working on my mac,
and had nearly 2 hours of chats with people around me. I also posted
some articles to a new website that we are developing that is meant to
help people get started with Ogg (see http://new.annodex.net/), but
it's still early days for that.

If you want to check out where I want to take us, go to
http://www.metavid.org/. It has video search down to the detailed
level by using transcripts such as Hansard as an index into the
videos. Once somebody else here has sorted out how to get hold of the
parliamentary recordings of state and federal, we can get that working
in a similar way. One step at a time!

Cheers,
Silvia.

Henare Degan

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Jun 14, 2009, 4:00:10 AM6/14/09
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On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 17:44, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviap...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've not got very far with this yet. I was planning on putting a Ogg
> Theora/Vorbis video into a page, probably Kate Lundy's page, and
> providing all the necessary javascript for it. But in the end I just
> registered and installed the web software, got it working on my mac,
> and had nearly 2 hours of chats with people around me. I also posted
> some articles to a new website that we are developing that is meant to
> help people get started with Ogg (see http://new.annodex.net/), but
> it's still early days for that.

Hi Silvia,

Thanks very much for the update, great to hear you got the web app up
and running. I think a lot of the chats were just as useful for
inspiring us, which is why I was keen to hear other peoples
experiences :)

> If you want to check out where I want to take us, go to
> http://www.metavid.org/. It has video search down to the detailed
> level by using transcripts such as Hansard as an index into the
> videos. Once somebody else here has sorted out how to get hold of the
> parliamentary recordings of state and federal, we can get that working
> in a similar way. One step at a time!

One step at a time indeed! I've added OA-285 to our issue tracker to
track us getting access to the videos. I remember we had a bit of a
chat about this at linux.conf.au 2009 and someone mentioned speaking
to the ABC about getting access to their video - maybe someone closer
to the issue can add details to that ticket.

Thanks again,

Henare

Sherif

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Jun 14, 2009, 7:28:54 AM6/14/09
to OpenAustralia Development
Awesome stuff. Thanks for organising the day guys.

I'm hoping to get the wordpress up ready for downloading and use in a
week or so... just trying to get past my exams :-)

Ill keep the Jira case updated


On Jun 14, 6:00 pm, Henare Degan <henare.de...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 17:44, Silvia Pfeiffer
>
> <silviapfeiff...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've not got very far with this yet. I was planning on putting a Ogg
> > Theora/Vorbis video into a page, probably Kate Lundy's page, and
> > providing all the necessary javascript for it. But in the end I just
> > registered and installed the web software, got it working on my mac,
> > and had nearly 2 hours of chats with people around me. I also posted
> > some articles to a new website that we are developing that is meant to
> > help people get started with Ogg (seehttp://new.annodex.net/), but

Silvia Pfeiffer

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Jun 14, 2009, 8:46:12 AM6/14/09
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Awesome! And thanks for organising the day!!
Silvia.

Henare Degan

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Jun 14, 2009, 8:51:09 AM6/14/09
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On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 21:28, Sherif<sherifg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Awesome stuff. Thanks for organising the day guys.
>
> I'm hoping to get the wordpress up ready for downloading and use in a
> week or so... just trying to get past my exams :-)
>
> Ill keep the Jira case updated

Hey Sherif,

It was great to meet you yesterday and great to see your cool work on
the Wordpress plugin, I'm really looking forward to seeing the code
(I'll keep my eye on the ticket).

Once you get the code up we can use it as an example for the first new
development to use the API! (Like the Examples section on the TWFY API
page http://www.theyworkforyou.com/api/)

Good luck with your exams too.

Cheers,

Henare

Mark Stanton

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Jun 15, 2009, 12:38:16 AM6/15/09
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Hi All

I've been watching the progress of openaustralia.org with interest for a while and was disappointed I couldn't make the hackfest on the weekend (was freezing my butt off in a tent up the coast). 

Anyway I'm keen get involved. 

I've downloaded the app this morning and have it all running on my laptop so I'm pretty much good to go. OA-173 looks like an obvious candidate, back am open to other suggestions.

Can someone set me up in JIRA?


Cheers
Mark
--
Mark Stanton
Gruden Pty Ltd
http://www.gruden.com

Matthew Landauer

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Jun 15, 2009, 12:56:54 AM6/15/09
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That's great! I've set you up with developer permissions on JIRA so
you can now assign yourself tickets.

As far as I know nobody else is working on OA-173 so it's totally
yours. Please just go for it.

All the best,
Matthew

Henare Degan

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Jun 15, 2009, 12:58:43 AM6/15/09
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On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 14:38, Mark Stanton<mark.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can someone set me up in JIRA?

Hi Mark,

Great to hear! Sign up on
http://tickets.openaustralia.org/secure/Signup!default.jspa then email
your username to the list and someone will make you a developer so you
can assign the ticket to yourself and mark it as In Progress when you
start working on it.

Cheers,

Henare

Mark Stanton

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Jun 15, 2009, 1:00:59 AM6/15/09
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Done. Username is mark.stanton.

Cheers
Mark

Jake MacMullin

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Jun 15, 2009, 1:44:11 AM6/15/09
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Matthew,

While you're setting Jira permissions - can you please make me a dev
too so I can add some more detail about the 'fixmystreet' clone?
Actually, could you add a 'fix my street' module too (so I can group
related issues)?

Thanks,

Jake

Matthew Landauer

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Jun 15, 2009, 2:10:47 AM6/15/09
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Done and done. :)

Domain Admin

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Jun 15, 2009, 11:37:19 PM6/15/09
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On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Henare Degan<henare...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Statistics
>
> During the day we had:
>
> Five total commits, two to the web application and three to the parser
> Nine issues in total updated in the bug tracker, with four issues resolved
> A number of new developers added to the bug tracker so there's now over 10
> people that can update tickets
>
> There's a lot more effort that's not in these numbers that hopefully will be
> coming out in the days ahead as people start releasing their results from
> the day.

And one CPAN release. :)

http://search.cpan.org/~adamk/Politics-AU-Geo-0.01/

Adam K

Henare Degan

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Jun 16, 2009, 7:03:11 PM6/16/09
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Very cool Adam, sorry I missed this in the original announcement. I
liked the blog post[0] you did too, I found it after the OpenAustralia
tweet[1].

Cheers,

Henare

[0] http://use.perl.org/~Alias/journal/39123
[1] http://twitter.com/OpenAustralia/status/2175461523

Jake MacMullin

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Jun 16, 2009, 7:16:05 PM6/16/09
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Adam,

Does this Perl module include the electorates data? For all of
Australia? For all levels of government?

Or does it use the OpenAustralia database?

At the hackfest the other day there was some mention of a service
being developed that would provide geo-location > electorate mapping
for all levels of government. I was wondering if this is that?

Cheers,

Jake

Jeffery Candiloro

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Jun 16, 2009, 8:09:36 PM6/16/09
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G'Day Jake,

I'm the guy responsible for myrepresentatives.org which I suspect is the
service you heard mention of on Sat. The Perl module that Adam talks
about is the first pass at modularising the code behind
myrepresentatives.org.

At the moment, the DB contains the geo data for the House of Reps, the
Senate, and the NSW and Vic Legislative Assemblies and Legislative
Councils as well as the details of the elected officials in all those
chambers. There is some other member data in there but no matching geo
data.

I am working on a couple of simultaneous projects. One, getting more
geo data. To date, this has been sourced from Mapinfo files published
by electoral commissions that are processed with custom Perl code. I am
working on adding the kml data provided by http://www.tallyroom.com.au/maps.

The other project is a scraper to gather data on all the elected
officials in Australia at all three levels of govt. You can find this
code at http://svn.ali.as/cpan/websites/myrepresentatives.org/members/ .
If you want more info on that, email me directly.

My aim is to eventually combine the geo and the member data for all
representative chambers in Australia (which run to approx 580 bodies)
and make the data available at myrepresentatives.org (app, DB, API,
whichever there is demand for). Adam's aim is to modularise all of this
and make it available via CPAN (which you can get more info on via his
journal posting).

At the moment there is no linkage between this and OA although I would
hope that eventually there will be for very obvious reasons.

Cheers

Jeffery

Mark Stanton

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Jun 16, 2009, 8:33:34 PM6/16/09
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Hi Jeffery 

Sounds interesting and potentially relevant to the work I'm starting on http://tickets.openaustralia.org/browse/OA-173. Can I pick your brains about mapping data & options at some point?

Cheers
Mark

Jake MacMullin

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Jun 16, 2009, 8:48:29 PM6/16/09
to openaust...@googlegroups.com
Jeffery,

Thanks for the speedy and informative reply. I'm interested in working
on an Australian 'FixMyStreet' style application (as an iPhone app in
the first instance - though that'll require some server-side code
which may grow over time). As such, I'm going to need a geo-location
(lat/long) to local-government look-up service. Is this something
you're planning on supporting?

Ideally, I'd love to be able to provide a lat/long and get back the
name of the local government body, a contact name, and a contact e-
mail for the purposes of reporting problems. Obviously you're probably
not planning on tackling this last part (name, phone and e-mail for
the person to contact at the govt body), but are you planning on doing
the first part?

If so - what's your timeframe? and how are you planning on making this
available? RESTful service? free for anyone to use as they wish? Open-
source code/data?

Cheers,

Jake

Matthew Landauer

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Jun 16, 2009, 9:06:50 PM6/16/09
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I think the lookup from lat/long to government body, contact name and email should be done on the server side. The web app (be it based on the current fixmystreet code from the UK or something new) will need to do that lookup. So, there's no need to duplicate all that logic on the client side.

Matthew

Jake MacMullin

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Jun 16, 2009, 9:08:15 PM6/16/09
to openaust...@googlegroups.com
Matthew,

Yes, that was my intention.

Cheers,

Jake

Kieren Diment

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Jun 16, 2009, 9:09:05 PM6/16/09
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On 17/06/2009, at 10:48 AM, Jake MacMullin wrote:

>
> Jeffery,
>
> Thanks for the speedy and informative reply. I'm interested in working
> on an Australian 'FixMyStreet' style application (as an iPhone app in
> the first instance - though that'll require some server-side code
> which may grow over time). As such, I'm going to need a geo-location
> (lat/long) to local-government look-up service. Is this something
> you're planning on supporting?
>
> Ideally, I'd love to be able to provide a lat/long and get back the
> name of the local government body, a contact name, and a contact e-
> mail for the purposes of reporting problems. Obviously you're probably
> not planning on tackling this last part (name, phone and e-mail for
> the person to contact at the govt body), but are you planning on doing
> the first part?
>
> If so - what's your timeframe? and how are you planning on making this
> available? RESTful service? free for anyone to use as they wish? Open-
> source code/data?
>


Here's your basic web service - lat/long electorate resolver (written
with fastcgi for efficiency - I'm guessing the db connection is
expensive) - also untested :) Also based on my reading of the
incomplete data.

Request with: http://my.host/electorate?lat=11.11&long=12.22
Returns JSON of electorate data.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use FindBin qw/$Bin/;
use Au::Politics::Geo "$Bin/db.sqlite" ;
use CGI::Simple;
use JSON::Any;
use FCGI;

while($request->Accept() >= 0) {
my $q = CGI::Simple->new;
my $lat = $q->param('lat');
my $long = $q->param('long');
my @electorates = Politics::AU::Geo->geo2electorates($lat, $long)
or die "couldn't find electorates from lat: $lat and long:
$long\n"
my $j = JSON::Any->new;

print $q->header(-type => 'application/json');
print $j->objToJson(\@electorates);
}


Kieren Diment

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Jun 16, 2009, 9:10:08 PM6/16/09
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On 17/06/2009, at 11:09 AM, Kieren Diment wrote:
>
>
> Here's your basic web service - lat/long electorate resolver (written
> with fastcgi for efficiency - I'm guessing the db connection is
> expensive) - also untested :) Also based on my reading of the
> incomplete data.


err, incomplete docs. Sorry.

Matthew Landauer

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Jun 16, 2009, 9:11:11 PM6/16/09
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Awesome. I'll just keep quiet and move off to the side. ;-)

Jake MacMullin

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Jun 16, 2009, 9:21:46 PM6/16/09
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Matthew,

no, don't keep quiet or move to the side... if you want to write the 'fixmystreet' server side (or anyone else for that matter) you're most welcome to. I've created some Jira issues. 

My focus is the iPhone app - but it needs a (basic at the very least) server-side app to send data to. If anyone wants to work on it, they're most welcome. Though if no-one does I'll probably implement something (very) basic so that my iPhone app has something to talk to :-)

Cheers,

Jake

Jake MacMullin

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Jun 16, 2009, 9:23:12 PM6/16/09
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Thanks - so does the list of electorates include 'local government'?
and state and federal? Is there a way to specify the level of
government I'm interested in, or do I have to filter?

Cheers,

Jake


On 17/06/2009, at 11:09 AM, Kieren Diment wrote:

>
>

Jeffery Candiloro

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Jun 17, 2009, 4:58:58 AM6/17/09
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There is a new version of the DB available. It is twice the size (in
MB) and contains all the state and federal geo data. No LGA yet.

Cheers

Jeffery


Jake MacMullin wrote:

Domain Admin

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Jun 17, 2009, 6:04:41 AM6/17/09
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On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 10:48 AM, Jake MacMullin <jmacm...@mac.com> wrote:

Jeffery,

Thanks for the speedy and informative reply. I'm interested in working
on an Australian 'FixMyStreet' style application (as an iPhone app in
the first instance - though that'll require some server-side code
which may grow over time). As such, I'm going to need a geo-location
(lat/long) to local-government look-up service. Is this something
you're planning on supporting?

The Politics::AU::Geo code and the sqlite data model supports this already, it just doesn't contain the data yet.

I think Jeffery has just updated the SQLite file with the state level data, and he's working on getting the local data and populating it into the file.

But the current code does implement local just fine as soon as the polygons land in the database.

Adam K

Domain Admin

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Jun 17, 2009, 6:06:31 AM6/17/09
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This code is buggy though (Au::Politics::Geo?) and I'm assume it's not tested...

So consider it an example only.

Adam K

Jeffery Candiloro

unread,
Jun 18, 2009, 11:23:09 PM6/18/09
to openaust...@googlegroups.com
G'Day all,

Further to previous emails there is a first pass at a public API
available on myrepresentatives.org. It returns all the electorates that
a given address is in (at the moment just state and Federal).

PLEASE CONSIDER THIS AN ALPHA. If you have any feedback let me know.
Also, there is some noise in the data which I am working on cleaning.

Access is via a simple GET -
http://myrepresentatives.org/publicapi.pl?address=114+smith+road+strathfield+nsw

You will get back JSON. Either:

i) 0 if Google cannot resolve the address to anything meaningful.
ii) An array of addresses if Google returns more than one unique address.
iii) An array of arrays of the electorates. Each Array contains the
[Level, Chamber_Name, State, Electorate_Name].

The initial request will be slow as the db is loaded (any suggestions
for better hosting appreciated) but subsequent ones will be faster.

Hope someone finds this useful.

Cheers

Jeffery


Jake MacMullin wrote:

Matthew Landauer

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Jun 26, 2009, 7:06:52 PM6/26/09
to openaust...@googlegroups.com
Hi Jeffery,

This is really cool. I'm looking forward to being able to use this for openaustralia. Just need to get cracking on getting permission to republish the Hansard for all the states / territories. There's been some big progress in that area in the last week which I need to update everybody about. (Blog post)

On the hosting front: you could have space on the openaustralia server if you want if you're willing to share some of the responsibility of admin for the server. It's a VPS so we can do whatever we like. :-)

Another quick question: is there a document somewhere that explains where all the different datasets come from and what their licensing is?

All the best,
Matthew

Jeffery Candiloro

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Jun 27, 2009, 12:34:21 AM6/27/09
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G'Day Matthew,

Looking forward to hearing the news about state Hansards.

Hosting - thanks but it looks like Rob Manson will be able to help out.

The boundary data comes from three sources at the moment:
* The AEC - their copyright notice has been added as per their
requirements
(http://aec.gov.au/Electorates/gis/GIS_Data_Download_Data_Licence.htm)
* The NSW Electoral Commission - a notice has been added. According to
here http://elections.nsw.gov.au/copyright the data can be used for
non-commercial purposes (which is the case).
* The Vic Electoral Commission - a notice has been added. According to
here http://www.vec.vic.gov.au/copyright.html the data can be used for
non-commercial purposes (which is the case).
* The rest of the data is currently coming from Ben Raue at Tally Room
(http://www.tallyroom.com.au/maps). If anyone has a way to contact him
please let me know. This is also reflected on both the search and the
results pages.

I would like to move to raw geo data from the various electoral
commissions but they don't all make it available as yet.

Cheers

Jeffery


Matthew Landauer wrote:
> Hi Jeffery,
>
> This is really cool. I'm looking forward to being able to use this for
> openaustralia. Just need to get cracking on getting permission to
> republish the Hansard for all the states / territories. There's been
> some big progress in that area in the last week which I need to update
> everybody about. (Blog post)
>
> On the hosting front: you could have space on the openaustralia server
> if you want if you're willing to share some of the responsibility of
> admin for the server. It's a VPS so we can do whatever we like. :-)
>
> Another quick question: is there a document somewhere that explains
> where all the different datasets come from and what their licensing is?
>
> All the best,
> Matthew
>
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Jeffery Candiloro
> <jef...@astraaustralis.com.au <mailto:jef...@astraaustralis.com.au>>
> wrote:
>
>
> G'Day all,
>
> Further to previous emails there is a first pass at a public API
> available on myrepresentatives.org <http://myrepresentatives.org>.

James

unread,
Jun 28, 2009, 9:57:48 AM6/28/09
to OpenAustralia Development
Hey Jeffrey,

I'm in touch with Ben (asked him about his GIS > KML conversion
process just the other day with the aim of contributing his experience
of it to OA (i.e. this thread on twitter http://twitter.com/benraue/status/2358269173))

I think even with his conversion you'll have the problem of too much
detail but definitely worth building on the example.

Happy to put you in touch with him if you'd like.

-James


On Jun 27, 2:34 pm, Jeffery Candiloro <jeff...@astraaustralis.com.au>
wrote:
> G'Day Matthew,
>
> Looking forward to hearing the news about state Hansards.
>
> Hosting - thanks but it looks like Rob Manson will be able to help out.
>
> The boundary data comes from three sources at the moment:
> * The AEC - their copyright notice has been added as per their
> requirements
> (http://aec.gov.au/Electorates/gis/GIS_Data_Download_Data_Licence.htm)
> * The NSW Electoral Commission - a notice has been added.  According to
> herehttp://elections.nsw.gov.au/copyrightthe data can be used for
> non-commercial purposes (which is the case).
> * The Vic Electoral Commission - a notice has been added.  According to
> herehttp://www.vec.vic.gov.au/copyright.htmlthe data can be used for
> non-commercial purposes (which is the case).
> * The rest of the data is currently coming from Ben Raue at Tally Room
> (http://www.tallyroom.com.au/maps).  If anyone has a way to contact him
> please let me know.  This is also reflected on both the search and the
> results pages.
>
> I would like to move to raw geo data from the various electoral
> commissions but they don't all make it available as yet.
>
> Cheers
>
> Jeffery
>
>
>
> Matthew Landauer wrote:
> > Hi Jeffery,
>
> > This is really cool. I'm looking forward to being able to use this for
> > openaustralia. Just need to get cracking on getting permission to
> > republish the Hansard for all the states / territories. There's been
> > some big progress in that area in the last week which I need to update
> > everybody about. (Blog post)
>
> > On the hosting front: you could have space on the openaustralia server
> > if you want if you're willing to share some of the responsibility of
> > admin for the server. It's a VPS so we can do whatever we like. :-)
>
> > Another quick question: is there a document somewhere that explains
> > where all the different datasets come from and what their licensing is?
>
> > All the best,
> > Matthew
>
> > On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Jeffery Candiloro
> > <jeff...@astraaustralis.com.au <mailto:jeff...@astraaustralis.com.au>>
> > wrote:
>
> >     G'Day all,
>
> >     Further to previous emails there is a first pass at a public API
> >     available on myrepresentatives.org <http://myrepresentatives.org>.
> >      It returns all the electorates that
> >     a given address is in (at the moment just state and Federal).
>
> >     PLEASE CONSIDER THIS AN ALPHA.  If you have any feedback let me know.
> >     Also, there is some noise in the data which I am working on cleaning.
>
> >     Access is via a simple GET -
> >    http://myrepresentatives.org/publicapi.pl?address=114+smith+road+stra...

Domain Admin

unread,
Jun 28, 2009, 10:28:57 PM6/28/09
to openaust...@googlegroups.com
Some of the problems of volume can be addressed with process improvements.

For example, instead of using Perl data structures embedded in the
database, we can upgrade to doing the geometry inside the database
itself (probably with the PostGIS enhancements to Postgres).

I seriously doubt that the total volume of electorate data will even
remotely stress it, as there will be people doing much much more
complex things than us with it.

Of course, anything that needs to be sent down the wire to the user
and rendered in the client will need some form of vertice-culled
electorates instead.

Adam K
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