We’ve moved! View all our blogs and resources here: codeforaustralia.org/resources Hello loyal readers! We’ve just launched a brand new website which is where all of our new blog posts will live from now on. Please check it out here. Existing blog posts will remain up on this Medium page, but all future content will be posted exclusively on our website. You can also: ⌨️ You can join our Slack stay up to date on other opportunities, projects and initiatives. ? Come to one of our Open House events to see what we’re working on and meet others from the civic tech community. ? Get in ..read more

Today, 8th March is International Women’s Day, and we’re taking this opportunity to speak with three amazing women working in civic tech. We hear from Kyreena Hay, a Developer and Service Designer who has worked in the public sector as well as for various NGOs; Michelle Cabanela — Principle Product Manager at Service NSW, and Cassitie Galliott, Code for Australia’s Head of Delivery and People. Image: Michelle Cabanela, Kyreena Hay, and Cassitie Galliott Despite the fact that some of the earliest programmers were groundbreaking women, there is still a huge disparity in the amount of w ..read more

A tale of three dashboards — Open Data dashboards from the perspective of a designer and developer This blog post is written by Michael Lai and Chethana Reddy. This is the second blog post about the Code for Australia Fellowship with the Revenue Digital team at Revenue NSW. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a Fellowship, it is a six-month program where technology professionals are embedded with a government partner to help deliver better experiences for citizens. Revenue NSW is responsible for collecting revenues, administering grants and recovery of debts, and Revenue Digital is t ..read more

Talking About a More Digital Government: Episode 6 — Best Civic Tech Projects of 2021 To round out the end of the year, we’re highlighting some of the amazing civic tech projects that have caught our eye. The three projects we’ve chosen to highlight. It’s been an amazing time in civic tech. As a result of the pandemic, we’ve seen a huge rise in interest in how technology and civic duty and communication intersect, and we’ve also witnessed more people take creating and maintaining solutions into their own hands. This episode serves to highlight just a few of those amazing project ..read more

I kicked off our Base Team update blogs this year with our plans for the year. Let’s check in on how things played out for us. When we shared our organisational strategy and plans for 2021 we were confident that a new iteration of Base Team, who had spent 2020 establishing how we were going to collaborate, and coping well with everything the pandemic threw at us, would be able to get a lot done this year. While we didn’t end up shipping everything we thought we would, we made the most of some surprise opportunities and have an exciting slate of new products and services in the works ..read more

Women leading the way in design and tech — Code for Australia style Discover what we’ve been doing to improve Gender Equity in our organisation. It’s been almost six months since our last update on our Gender Equity work (you can play catch up here if you missed our last post). When we last left, we had planned to keep chugging away at our Gender Audit to-do items, hold some women-focused events and come up with some ways to attract more women developers. So how did we do and what have we learned? Read on to find out what have we been up to over the past few months… Events, events, e ..read more

To say 2021 was hard on public servants would be an understatement — from long hours to the collective burnout many people felt, it was a tough year on all of us. But, the sun is starting to shine again, and like the adage says — we’ve heard that diamonds are made under pressure, and over time ?. So we can’t think of a better way to wrap up 2021 than by highlighting the very people who have helped us get through it. People working behind the scenes, the folks that don’t get celebrated nearly enough — those working in the public sector. We asked our community of public sector workers ..read more

For the past four months, Sindhu, Mustafa and I have been doing a Fellowship with Infoxchange — a not-for-profit social enterprise that has been delivering technology for social justice for over 40 years. You can read more about our Fellowship here. We have been tasked with building Ask Izzy Plus, a brand new website that helps social service workers and volunteers to find help for their clients. For example, a volunteer at a homeless shelter who is helping someone fleeing family violence could go on our site and search for family violence support services nearby. Ask Izzy Plus is the evo ..read more

In the latest episode of our podcast, we speak with Lisa McClean, CEO of NSW Circular and Cate Turner, Manager Data Insights & Intelligence at Sustainability Victoria about government initiatives in the circular economy space. Lisa McClean and Cate Turner Lisa McClean is the CEO of NSW Circular, a a NSW government-funded body with environment, economic and social goals embedded into their work. Lisa provides great context and definitions about what circular economy is, why it’s the way of the future and some ways consumers can get involved. Cate Turner, Manager Data Insights & ..read more

Here are some of our favourite activities you can run with your team to improve their communication skills and help them get the most out of their work. At Code for Australia, we run a number of regular workshops with our teams to help them in their careers. Some of these workshops are technical (Writing Good Bug Reports, Accessibility 101) while others are centred around what many refer to as “soft skills” — communication, organisation etc. If you ask us though, these are pretty “hardcore skills” ?. Our Fellowship program sees us pair purpose-driven designers and developers with gov ..read more