Monday, December 21, 2009

OpenAustralia team launches PlanningAlerts (with financial support from the Gov 2.0 Taskforce)

The team responsible for OpenAustralia has, with the financial assistance of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce (via a Microsoft-backed fund), launched PlanningAlerts.

This free new service allows Australians to sign up to email alerts for planning permission requests in their local area so that they can know what is being requested and lodge their views. It is based on the UK version, PlanningAlerts.com.

PlanningAlerts relies on councils making their information available online - preferably in machine-readable format. Therefore it currently doesn't cover all Australian councils.

It's now up to the Australian councils who do not make this information available online to do so, and I hope we see a wave of them come online soon.

If your council doesn't make this public information available online, perhaps it's worth asking one of your councillors why...

2 comments:

  1. Oh neat.

    I've just asked my local council to think about supporting it (writing a screen scraper for them went into the too hard basket pretty quickly!) and I've also just sent off an email to the people behind EDALA (http://www.planning.sa.gov.au/).

    When I showed it to some of our valuers here at work, they were all pretty positive about the concept. Fingers crossed...

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  2. This is a great positive approach. Any process that can speed up the bureaucrats is a step in the right direction

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