Launch of FixMyStreet Australia - starting with NSW

[Andrew Perry]

As mentioned before, we've been working on FixMyStreet Australia.  We thought it would be unAustralian for it not to be available on Australia Day, so we've officially launched with NSW as the first State at http://nsw.fixmystreet.org.au

We have the data to bring the other States/Territories online, but thought we'd test how it all goes with NSW before we light up the other jurisdictions next month.

As part of the deployment we also setup an Open311 server using https://github.com/mysociety/fms-endpoint. This enables us to demonstrate the benefits of using Open 311 to enable any application, not just FMS, to detect the categorisation that a council wants issues to be submitted with, from that council's own server.  This saves every developer/application having to build and maintain it's own list of issue categories for each council, by using a list of councils' Open 311 servers.  As we come across them, and hopefully get more out there, we'll create a public directory of them.

We have also setup a MapIt server at http://mapit.openlocal.org.au that has local, state and federal government electoral boundaries.  If you haven't already checked out MapIt, the really nice thing is that it makes it easy to view the boundaries on an OpenStreetMap.  You can see the Federal boundaries here: http://mapit.openlocal.org.au/areas/CED.html

The Open Local MapIt server is freely available for non-commercial use.  You can also download the source direct from mySociety at https://github.com/mysociety/mapit or you can use an Amazon Machine Image from http://code.mapit.mysociety.org/install/ami/ (if only that was around when we were building the Open Local MapIt server)!

Have a great Australia Day!

Regards


Andrew

Open Local

www.openlocal.org.au

P  1300 832 337
M  0413 045 300
ABN 86 141 111 391

[Steve Dalton]

Awesome!  I'd be very interested in helping with gold coast when other states come on line.

Steve

Sent from my Android phone

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[Rosie Williams]

These sites are beautiful. I only wish they had Twitter & LinkedIn buttons on them so I could easily share them!

Happy Australia Day,

Rosie

http://budgetaus.net

@budget_aus

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Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2013 05:42:26 +1100
From: and...@openlocal.org.au
To: openaust...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Launch of FixMyStreet Australia - starting with NSW

[Andrew Perry]

Great suggestion!

Done.

Looking forward to the mentions (thanks for the Tweet already) ;-)

Rosie Williams wrote:

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to openaustralia-...@googlegroups.com.

[Rosie Williams]

Great. Of course now I have to blame you for inspiring me to spend my day working on a mashup using MapIt ;-)

Rosie

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Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2013 12:51:51 +1100
From: and...@openlocal.org.au
To: openaust...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Launch of FixMyStreet Australia - starting with NSW

[Andrew Perry]

That's exciting - I look forward to checking it out when you're ready!

Users of mapit.openlocal.org.au should sign up to the list at http://www.emaillist.com.au/mailman/listinfo/mapit so that we can keep you updated if we're needing to do maintenance or are adding new features/areas.

Andrew


Rosie Williams wrote:

[Rosie Williams]

So here it is: http://budgetaus.net/postcodes/index.php

It is basically an interface for getting results from MapIt by town/city + state or post code.

Let me know if you think it is useful!

regards

Rosie

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Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2013 16:40:21 +1100

[Andrew Perry]

Very cool!

We were looking for something to deal with the lack of support out of the box for postcode areas in MapIt (see ticket and discussion here: https://github.com/mysociety/mapit/issues/51 - I have taken the liberty of posting a link there to your solution so correct me if I am wrong on what it's returning, which I think I am on closer inspection!)

Your service also highlights an issue we are currently wrestling with in terms of how best to deal with duplication in datasets that have different origins - eg Local Government boundaries if you search on a NSW postcode, and State Government boundaries if searching on a WA postcode.  Maybe we just need to clarify in the description for the area.

You can limit your results by appending the rest request url with ?type=WAS,CED,LGS if you just want the ABS results for Commonwealth and Local Government boundaries in WA, with the more up to date WAEC State Electorates (compared with the ABS's SEB areas), and ?type=CED,SEB,LGA in NSW if you want to limit the results to NSW Federal and State data from the ABS (which are up to date), with the proper local council names from the non-ABS dataset we have in LGA.

Are you happy for us to promote your mashup as a great example of open innovation?

Regards


Andrew


Rosie Williams wrote:

[Andrew Perry]

PS - the Australia Post postcode data that datalicious has created the derivative work from is (very) unfortunately only made available for non-commercial use.  For that reason we haven't loaded it into MapIt directly for now, as we prefer more liberal licences.

I expect many of the uses being made of the datalicious derivative are commercial and get a lot of benefit out of it, which is another reason why Australia Post should be encouraged/required to release it freely under a more liberal licence!

Regards


Andrew


Andrew Perry wrote:

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

What about the CC-BY ABS Postal Areas data set? http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/1270.0.55.003July%202011?OpenDocument

[Rosie Williams]

Hi Andrew, 

Thanks for the feedback :-) I'll definitely look into your suggestions. Please do promote the site but I'm not sure about the limit on MapIt usage as it says  'this service is rate limited to an average of one request every two seconds.' 

I'm fairly new to programming and haven't had to deal with these kinds of issues before so if I make any geek faux paus please give me a heads up!

I've had a quick squiz at the ticket but I'm pretty tired tonight. Can you elaborate the question?

Rosie

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Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 19:02:10 +1100

[Andrew Perry]

Thanks Alex, yes, we're using that ABS data but the Australia Post database is handy in giving you the postcode (and with datalicious's derivative a lat/long) for your Suburb, so that you can lookup the postcode area using the ABS data on MapIt.

I am not aware of ABS having that linkage between suburbs and postcodes available :(

Alex (Maxious) Sadleir wrote:

[Andrew Perry]

Alex, on a closer look I see there are State Suburbs mapinfo/shapefiles on that page too so we should be able to use those to do a direct lookup on and then see which Postal Areas overlap... thanks for prompting me to have a better look!

Andrew Perry wrote:

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

Yep, when I was making the data for ACT Election Leaflets, I linked electorates to postcodes/suburbs using the various ABS datasets and QGIS https://groups.google.com/d/topic/openaustralia-dev/LcELLUVilsE/discussion

Here's what it looks like when I intersect suburbs and postal areas (which way around doesn't matter this time it seems) https://gist.github.com/4647602

And the centroids of suburbs https://gist.github.com/4647632 (via http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/8844/get-list-of-coordinates-for-points-in-a-layer)

BTW the ABS do warn that their postal areas aren't exactly postcodes http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/D3310114.nsf/home/frequently+asked+questions#Anchor20

For example Acton in the ACT shows up intersecting 2601 which is alright and 2615 which makes no sense to humans but is sort of touching. Maybe a different GIS tool (or MapIt) could be a little less sensitive to intersections.

(It also doesn't have the special 0200 postcode for the ANU inside Acton)

[Andrew Perry]

Nice - I'll look at loading up the Suburbs into MapIt to replicate it there.

(Rosie, this may remove a dependency on the datalicious dataset for your lookup tool)

Thanks

Andrew

Alex (Maxious) Sadleir wrote:

[Rosie Williams]

Ok Andrew, I had not thought of using the page for commercial purposes anyway but thanks for the background on the licencing of the Datalicious file.

regards

Rosie

---

Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 21:19:20 +1100

From: and...@openlocal.org.au
To: openaust...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Launch of FixMyStreet Australia - starting with NSW

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[AndrewHarvey]

...and when you use an (asgs2pgsql database)[https://github.com/andrewharvey/asgs2pgsql] of the ASGS you can just run,

SELECT
  poa.name as poa_name,
  ssc.code as ssc_code,
  ssc.name as ssc_name
FROM asgs_2011.poa AS poa
JOIN asgs_2011.ssc AS ssc
  ST_Intersects(poa.geom, ssc.geom) AND ST_Relate(poa.geom, ssc.geom, 'T********'); -- interiors intersect

which will (I believe) give you the same as you have in your gist, the mappings between postcodes and suburbs, according to the ASGS.

[Libya Foundation]

Dear Mr. Perry:

Great work you guys have done! I wanted to ask you a few general questions, to help me in the processing of establishing FixMyStreet where I live:

(1) Is it problematic if we don't have postal addresses here in our country? We do use intersections, and we have neighborhood names. 

(2) Is the system only as good as the OSM maps? 

(3) Is installation easy? 

Thanks,

Aladdin El-Haraty, Board Member

The Libya Foundation, Inc.

libyafoundation.wordpress.com

www.facebook.com/libyafoundation

Tel: +218-92-265-9892