In addition to our work with corporate and non-profit organisations, our team has a passion for helping government agencies share information and provide useful online services to the community.

Gov 2.0 is all about using technology to enable governments to engage more effectively with citizens, empower citizens to communicate their ideas and suggestions to government more effectively, and making government developed data and technology available to citizens and organisations in a way that enables them to be more productive.

Andrew Perry, a founding director of Community Builders, completed a thesis in 1995 called, "Global Village or Global Market - Who is driving the bus on the information superhighway?"  The paper outlined the potential for the Internet in creating a public sphere for both commercial and civic engagement, and predicted that the commercial opportunities of the Internet would be exploited before the civic ones.  We are excited that 15 years later, the time has come for the civic potential of the Internet to be realised!

To this end, a team from Community Builders attended the inaugural GovHack in Canberra late last year. There we worked alongside a number of teams of developers to create “mashups” of government data, to make that data more accessible and useful. Over the course of the weekend we built a website called myMP - where Australians will be able to keep an eye on what their local politicians are doing to help them and submit questions for public or private response. You can see the alpha version of the site that we pulled together in 12 hours at www.mymp.com.au.

Members of our team are actively involved in and supportive of OpenAustralia, the grass roots politech community that created www.openaustralia.org. OA makes Federal Hansard information more readily accessible by publishing the speeches on its website with the ability for users to leave comments, as well as e-mailing users who subscribe to alerts whenever their nominated MPs speak in Parliament.

Our staff have also assisted OpenAustralia in relation to the Planning Alerts service, which was funded by the Federal Government 2.0 Taskforce, including through the development of software to “scrape” planning data from the Marrickville Council website, so that Planning Alerts subscribers are now notified when a new development application is published in the Marrickville community.

We are currently investigating bringing www.fixmystreet.org to Australia, to help local councils and their constituents keep their community "safe and sound".