Launching OpenAus - new financial/political transparency site for Australia

[Rosie Williams]

Hi all, 

I'd like to introduce my new and quite large political and financial transparency project OpenAus. I've been working without remuneration on the issue of financial transparency for the past 3 years and hope to get this new and very large project on a financial footing so that I may continue with this important work. 

Most of the data sets used in OpenAus are being used for the first time. The entire site is hand coded from scratch by myself (front end and back end). This includes graphs, all of which are my own original code in PHP/CSS driven by MySQL queries on the back end. 

There are several 'sub-projects' each relating to a separate data-set (and this is only the beginning as every federal agency must now publish grants data) and each of these sub-projects also provides results where available from the other data sets so users can see where government money is spent for a search term on both grants and tenders data from various jurisdictions in the one page eg

https://openaus.net.au/commonwealth/tenders/descriptions.php?description=housing&order=approved&submit=Go

This has all been a massive amount of work which I have accomplished unaided and at my own expense despite living in poverty with access to only shared wifi! There do not seem to be accessible funds for this kind of work in Australia which is why so few open data projects get up and running. I have no idea if this one will continue as it depends entirely on whether Australians get behind it financially. It is much too big a project to do on any basis other than full time. But I have to give it my best shot and that is what I am doing. 

One feature of the project provides a level of financial and political transparency which has not previously existed in Australia, allowing users to see the relationship between various governments and how that affects tender contract allocation on an electorate by electorate basis. eg

http://openaus.net.au/commonwealth/tenders/index.php?electorate=Warringah

I hope the site will be of interest to this community.

regards

Rosie Williams