Creating open data about Australia’s local councillors: Our Outreachy Internship 2017
Channel: LinuxConfAu 2018 - Sydney, Australia
Date: 2018-01-25

Hisayo Horie, Luke Bacon

http://lca2018.linux.org.au/schedule/presentation/84/

This is the story of the first Outreachy Internship to work on an Australian Free Software project.

Outreachy Internships are a way for newcomers from underrepresented backgrounds to get experience contributing to free and open source software projects by doing paid, full-time work. The attendees of LCA 2017 raised over $20,000 to fund Outreachy Internships, and this was the first one!

In 2016 the OpenAustralia Foundation built a system for you to have an open exchange with your local councillors about planning applications in your area.  As usual, there's no useful, comprehensive open data about local councillors that can be used to run a system like this—so we created it.  But there's too many councils for the OpenAustralia Foundation’s tiny team to maintain this data. This is a common problem for civic tech projects around the world.

In their Outreachy internship, Hisayo Horie build a tool for people all over Australia to keep the records for their local area up-to-date and contribute it as open data. This means the system the OpenAustralia Foundation built can actually get used, and the data can come from the people who actually use it.

Hear from Hisayo and Luke Bacon (OAF) about the Outreachy experience and their process of collaborating on civic technology across time-zones.

This talk was given at Linux.conf.au 2018 (LCA2018) which was held on 22-26 January 2018 in Sydney Australia.

linux.conf.au is a conference about the Linux operating system, and all aspects of the thriving ecosystem of Free and Open Source Software that has grown up around it. Run since 1999, in a different Australian or New Zealand city each year, by a team of local volunteers, LCA invites more than 500 people to learn from the people who shape the future of Open Source. For more information on the conference see https://linux.conf.au/

#linux.conf.au #linux #foss #opensource