Tools to visualise access to information

Editor's Note: This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog.

When Google’s services are blocked or filtered, we can’t serve our users effectively. That’s why we act every day to maximise free expression and access to information. To promote transparency around this flow of information, we’ve built an interactive online Transparency Report with tools that allow people to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked. We believe that this kind of transparency can be a deterrent to censorship.

Like all companies, Google’s services occasionally experience traffic disruptions. Our new traffic tracking tool helps us and others track whether these interruptions are related to mechanical outages or are government-induced. Each traffic graph shows historic traffic patterns for a given country and service. Graphs are updated as data is collected, then normalized and scaled in units of 0 to 100. This new tool—which is global and includes China—will replace the Mainland China service availability chart, which showed product access for China alone. By showing outages, the traffic graphs visualise disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it's a government blocking information or a cable being cut. For example, the graphs show that YouTube has been inaccessible in Iran since June 12, 2009, following the disputed presidential election.

In April we also created a website that shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content. Today we’re updating this interactive Government Requests map with data from the first six months of 2010. We’ve also updated our analysis of the trends we saw across the data over the past six months. The new data for 2010 now includes the number of individual items asked to be removed, per country (for example, there may be many URLs per a single request.) You can learn more about trends in the data here. We view this as a concrete step that, we hope, will encourage both companies and governments to be similarly transparent.

Free expression is one of our core values. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. Free expression is, of course, also at the heart of Google’s business. Our products are specifically designed to help people create, communicate, share opinions and find information across the globe. We hope this step toward greater transparency—and these tools—will help in ongoing discussions about the free flow of information.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Victoria lands 90 new innovation starters

I'm thrilled to see a great initiative in Victoria. Premier John Brumby has announced that 90 new Victorian Government datasets have been released and set free for public access and consumption from www.data.vic.gov.au. That's 90 new ways to kick start innovation.

Premier Brumby has also launched App My State to encourage Victorians to use these 90 datasets to create new services to help Victorians. There are $100000 in prizes up for grabs, entries close on April 23rd.

At Google we're big believers that information is more powerful when it's set free. Much of the effort of the Government 2.0 Taskforce I took part in last year was put into making public sector information freely accessible to everyone. I firmly believe that there's no point keeping publicly funded, non-confidential public data (such as transit information, post box locations, recycling and waste collection information, public school catchment areas and countless others) locked up behind a Government firewall, of little use to anyone. I want to see this PSI freely available to all. It will promote great social benefits, not least the immense potential for innovative new products and services to be developed here. We saw some great mash ups come out of our Hackfest competition.

Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director Google Australia and New Zealand

Two great hackfest days!

This is a guest cross post from blog.openaustralia.org

Last weekend, OpenAustralia held its second hackfest at Google's Sydney office. If you haven't come across OpenAustralia.org before, it's a volunteer run website which helps you to find out what your representatives get up to in parliament with the aim of bridging the growing democratic disconnect that many people feel.

This time we went all out with a two day hackfest - 10:30am till 8pm both days. That's over 18 hours of hacking! As well as the venue and a fabulous team of volunteers, which included Tim Ansell, James Polley and Pamela Fox, Google provided lunch and snacks for both days. Thank you to Google for supporting this community!

It was an amazing turnout by an incredibly talented group of people. Over 90 people took part, including a surprise group from CSIRO who happened to be wandering past and dropped in to see what we were up to. We were also delighted to have 30 people take part in the first ever retroactively-named OpenAustralia installfest - installing the development virtual machine onto their laptops, and walking through the first steps showing how they can make changes to the code, test locally, and then submit to our repository on github. During the course of the hackfest, we had half a dozen or so patches pushed to us - we're still working through the process of accepting them all! We also had 40-odd updates to bugs on our tracker.





Photos by Halans. For more fabulous photos by Halans and others see Flickr.

This hackfest was timed to coincide with the Gov2.0 Taskforce MashupAustralia competition, and we encouraged people to work on mashups for the competition, OpenAustralia itself, or any other civic-minded project.

At the same time hacking on MashupAustralia on the weekend was the #melbhack session, organised by Lonely Planet and the GovHack folks.

If people weren't in the mood for hacking, either on a mashup or OpenAustralia, we had presentations and directed hacking sessions scheduled throughout both days. Plenty for all to do.

We gave out small prizes (donated by Google) to some of our favourite mashups created over the weekend. Working demos, however rough, won out over plans, however well-formed.

Our favourite mashup, the "Suburb Matchmaker", was created over the weekend by Raul Alberto Caceres (@totocol), Daniela Fernandez (@danira_98) and Roberto Arias Alegria (@roberto8080). It was particularly impressive that this team met over lunch on the first day and decided on the spot to work together. "Suburb Matchmaker" helps you find the suburb that's right for you by answering some simple questions.



Second place went to the "Frog Census" by Simon Swain (@psi6030). See where and when different frogs have been spotted in South Australia.



The irreverant "Bouncing Teapots" by Dan Bethell (@fxmonkeydan) and Ray Haleblian (@rhaleblian) came third. The "Bouncing Teapots" simulated members of the House of Representatives as teapots falling where the more time they spoke in parliament the more bouncy they were.



We hope that one of these or one the many other projects that were worked on over the weekend will win the MashupAustralia competition!

To follow OpenAustralia's progress and find out when we'll be running the next Hackfest near you please read our blog, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or join our community mailing list on Google Groups!

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

Guest posted by Matthew Landauer, Co-founder of OpenAustralia.org

Victorian Parliament opens up for question time

Today, Premier Brumby has joined the video democracy in the cloud and opened up his YouTube channel for question time. Victorians can submit their questions and vote on the ones they want answered.



One issue that may well attract some questions is online access to public data.

Information is becoming a pervasive and free resource, driving the growth of the digital economy worldwide. And yet very useful, publicly funded, non-confidential public sector information (PSI), such as public transport data, still isn't made available to all. With open access to this information there's immense potential for innovative new products and services to be developed here, promoting great social benefits. Google's Victorian bushfires map is a great example, and was only possible because the Victorian Country Fire Authority had the foresight to put an RSS feed on their site.

At Google we're always interested to hear about Government embracing online communications and information sharing. We were pleased to see that the Victorian Parliament recently released the report on its Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data with a key recommendation that the Victorian Government establish an Information Management Framework (IMF) with open access to Government information at no or marginal cost.

The Victorian Parliament's inquiry into access of this public information is a great step in the right direction.

Posted by Iarla Flynn, Public Policy and Government Affairs