For the second year in a row we're going to break with tradition and hold a meetup in January because one of the organizers of FSM is giving a talk at Linux Conf Au (or are we actually starting a new tradition?)

Unfortunately LCA is a little earlier this year and so we won't be able to meetup at our regular time and place but I hope you can all make it anyhow. It will also be a shorter meetup than usual with no Gnews prepared, but we'll still grab a bite to eat nearby after the talk ... anyhow, on with the official blurb:

How does a council scraping initiative started in the UK evolve to influence and inform how the Victorian Government manages its information? Planning Alerts was originally a UK service to allow people to subscribe to be notified when there was a planning application near them regardless of council boundaries. It's success has also been replicated (and improved) in Australia. It seems obvious to many of us that a significant factor is that the initial project and those that followed it were Open Source and open to the Communities they served. How can we better demonstrate to government the value of Open Standards and Open Data than by making it happen?