Here in Australia, the complete exclusion of Australians with technical knowledge from decision-making and development of public technology is so normalised that the minister in charge of digital transformation can get away with rebranding code from Singapore as a “sovereign Australian app” and redirecting blame at Google and Apple when COVIDSafe didn’t work when Australians needed it.

There is nothing natural or universal about the exclusion of people with technical knowledge from decisions about and development of government tech. In Switzerland, when members of this community discovered a serious cryptographic problem in their e-voting system, the Federal Chancellery funded us and Swiss experts to collaborate on an open, in-depth reassessment of the entire program. The NSW iVote system had the same bugs, but there was no serious reassessment and there is no plan to change their approach.

Inspired by Taiwan’s Sunflower movement we are a community of Aussies who want to change the status quo, a collective of people that pushes for better technology policy and practices across Australia’s public sector.

"I've seen overnight some of the best technical minds in the country have been independently going through the #covidsafe app" - Greg Hunt (Australian Minister for Health and Aged Care)

You can join our Discord Community, here is the invite link.