gatewatching

As already mentioned on this blog, I left QUT a couple of months ago to help out GetUp! with some e-democracy projects. The first iteration of the biggie, Project Democracy, is now live.

Especially over the last couple of weeks, there have been a lot of long days and nights with the awesome team I’ve been working with - Darren Loasby (GetUp!’s online director), James Ferguson and Charles Lee. A major component of the project - the technology that parses Hansard so that you can keep track of individual parliamentarians - was developed by some hardworking volunteers at OpenAustralia. And the whole GetUp! team have contributed endless ideas and support.

We’ve focussed initially on the Senate - partly because the finely-balanced Senate is a current focus for everyone concerned with Australian politics. But it’s also nice because it’s GetUp!’s third birthday, and the very first GetUp! campaign focussed on the Senate. A little bit of poetry there.

Alongside GetUp!’s traditional campaigning activities, Project Democracy represents a move towards facilitating democratic engagement - we want to help people communicate more directly with their representatives, and to understand better what they do. There’s a lot of functionality embedded in the site - people can follow their Senators’ parliamentary performances, track them in the media with tailored newsfeeds, see the whole chamber or their State’s senators at a glance, or contact their senators directly.

Also - and this is where it’s continuous with earlier projects I’ve worked on - people can sound off about how they think their senators are going on our Action Blogs. The whole thing is an experiment in combining existing capacities in a form which - I hope - will enhance political engagement and social capital.

Having said all of that, we’re really looking for feedback on the whole site, and information on the sort of functions people would like to see on the site in future, especially when we roll out the House of Reps component soon. Gatewatching readers should feel free to discuss it here, but we’re also happy to get feedback through the PD site. I think that we’ll be integrating a whole range of things, but people probably know that my interest is in building community at the hyperlocal level. Watch this space.

I’ll keep posting about this over the next little while. For now, I’m looking forward to a weekend of sleeping in, and the Cowboys at Shark Park on Saturday night.

Uncategorized e-democracy, GetUp!, Project Democracy, Senate