Outside-government technology

[vteague]

I’m prototyping an open-source system for allowing people to input important questions into parliamentary processes such as committee hearings, or just to ask their MP directly. People will be able to suggest their own questions or upvote others’. The main challenge is making it usable for everyone while making sure that it protects the privacy of people’s political preferences.

What are you building? What do you think needs to be built? What are the main challenges to be addressed?

[KipCrossing]

Along with the ausbills project, OpenGovAus are also working on legistream and it's corresponding legistream-site that are led by @king-millez. These projects aim to bring better access to Australian parliament live-streams.

We also have many other projects in the works.

[king-millez]

I’m prototyping an open-source system for allowing people to input important questions into parliamentary processes such as committee hearings, or just to ask their MP directly. People will be able to suggest their own questions or upvote others’. The main challenge is making it usable for everyone while making sure that it protects the privacy of people’s political preferences.

What are you building? What do you think needs to be built? What are the main challenges to be addressed?

As @KipCrossing said, we've been working on various projects as OpenGovAus, but expanding avenues with AusOpenTech could be something worth exploring.

[mukeshtiwari]

MiladKetabGhale, a student of Dirk Pattinson, has developed a modular framework for STV in Coq theorem prover which can be instantiate with different rules. You can see their code [1] . I have also developed a formally verified Schulze Method [2] and a formally verified homomorphic Schulze Method [3] in Coq theorem prover.

What are the main challenges to be addressed?
I don't have an exact answer, but I have an idea/opinion that if a software program is used by government for decision making, then it should be formally verified, similar to seL4, and open sourced. This would guaranteed that at least software program is not garbage and it follows the specification. I would be very happy to discuss some more ideas which I have for strengthening the democracy of Australia.

[1] https://github.com/MiladKetabGhale/Modular-STVCalculi
[2] https://github.com/mukeshtiwari/formalized-voting/tree/master/SchulzeOCaml
[3] https://github.com/mukeshtiwari/EncryptionSchulze/tree/master/code/Workingcode

[cofiem]

There are also the OpenAustralia projects - They vote for you, planning alerts, right to know. It would be good to pool resources, if possible, and not duplicate effort.

The OpenAustralia Hansard Parser particularly might be useful to many of the suggestions in this repo.

[vteague]

Thankyou everyone, this is exactly the sort of useful list I was hoping to slowly get generated. I completely agree that not duplicating effort is a key goal - indeed, just making sure that everyone working in this space has a fair idea of which other projects are running in parallel seems worthwhile. (Did the Hansard Parser people and the Aus-Bills people already know about each other?)

With pooling resources and not duplicating effort in mind, I've set up a wiki with a list of projects here and I'll set it up properly soon so others can add to it.

[cofiem]

Thanks for kicking this off, @vteague!

Some other related projects / research I'm aware of:

• QUT Digital Media Research Centre's Australian Twitter News Index
• CiviWiki looked interesting when I last checked, but seems to be on hold at the moment.
• There's an NZ govt law / Rules as Code movement. I'm not sure where this is at.
• This project has been on my radar as a way to index documents for research / journalism / finding connections Aleph Data.