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?
On the topic of open government, I just thought that I'd like to share a website that I've made. It's open source (AGPL-3.0+), and it tracks how every MP votes on every division in the Victorian Parliament. You can access it at http://vicvote.review