A social enterprise of advocates, storytellers and designers dedicated to helping organisations be open and making revolutionary civic technology to empower communities.
What we do
Our mission is to make information open, accessible, and meaningful for community audiences so they can be involved in decisions that impact them.
Our design innovation program helps organisations improve their data, content, and demystify their laws and processes for community audiences.
We apply systems thinking, participatory design, and visual storytelling to design information and location services that humanise data and connect digital systems.
We develop open source creative civic technology products to help governments and companies be open, communicate, and engage better.
We can support partners by training, conducting research, workshops, scoping projects, developing strategies, designing engaging experiences, digital services and products, and making useful content and data stories.
Our work
Legal Design & Open Process
We’ve worked with many partners to visually map legislation and regulations to help communities and businesses understand their roles, rights, responsibilities, and provide transparency about government decision making processes.
We provide research and design services to create visual and interactive journey maps, policy, project and program pathways for print, presentations, and online. We design and facilitate workshops that bring people together to collaboratively design and improve laws and processes.
Making advocacy easier
Making Open is a platform to connect changemakers through events, workshops, design and stories.
It’s for advocates, people in government, business and civil society who want to learn new approaches and visually communicate ways to make positive change.
Why? Advocates need help simply explaining the policies and information systems that can be put in place to support transparency, community participation, sustainable development, natural resource governance, and the energy transition.
Contact us to become a funding or content partner. Donations are tax-deductible donation via the Australian Cultural Fund.
Australia’s National Integrity System, Blueprint for Action
Led by Griffith University and Transparency International Australia, we helped design the blueprint - a publication for advocates to explain what’s needed to create a strong national integrity commission.
Open Ownership, Guide to Implementing Beneficial Transparency
Open Ownership is an international non government organisation whose mission is to drive greater corporate transparency across the world by making it easy to publish and access high-quality, linked data about who owns companies.
We worked with Open Ownership to wrangle their content and design the implementation guide.
Common Ground
Common Ground was a revolutionary open government web service we made with the Department of Resources and Energy between 2012-2014.
It helped people easily find information about coal, mineral, petroleum and gas activities in New South Wales, and simply explained the role of community in the decision making process.
It was a world leading example of connecting and presenting data for community audiences. Common Ground was decommissioned in 2023.
Future Transport
We created content to bring data and planning concepts to life across multiple channels for Transport for NSW's Future Transport Strategy and Plans to encourage community and industry participation. Designs included over 450 data visualisations, policy explainers, infographics, illustrations, gifs, animations and maps across the Master Strategy and Plans.
WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO
We care about our planet and people.
Our goal is to ensure laws, projects, and processes are designed to be nature positive and communities have clarity about economic, social and environmental impacts, and can access the resources they need now and into the future to be healthy and resilient.
Our work sets the foundation for democracies to redesign governance to be more open, inclusive and collaborative.
We have a unique set of creative skills, experience, and the technical capabilities to design open source products that transforms data and allows people to participate in the design and development of public policy, services, programs, and projects that impact them.
WHO WE'VE WORKED WITH
Who We Support
How we work
We are a female founded, certified social enterprise.
We only work on projects that align with our mission and values.
We seek out research and development partnerships to fund our products and scale our impact.
We love to share our knowledge, design bespoke workshops, and collaborate on content and design projects too.
If you’re interested in funding, partnering or working with us, get in touch!