The secret weapon of staff working for the start-up-loving, ideas-booming Prime Minister has been revealed: a not-for-profit side project that originally started life as a tool for the deaf.
The insight is the result of a decision by bureaucrats to release a list of the most visited web domains within the PM’s office for the purposes of government transparency.
Coming in at 15th on the list was the “Tveeder” website, which provides a live captioning service for TV channels and is run by a team of volunteers.
The idea for Tveeder came to Franco Trimboli, a technology product manager, when he was working with the deaf community in New Zealand on a substitute for the traditional voice-based emergency phone service.
He now works with a handful of volunteers to keep the site running and updating it with new features.
"We launched in 2011, with the idea that the hearing impaired could use the service to access a great source of realtime information - television,” he said.
"Since then, it has grown into a useful resource for everyone."
He said the site costs up to $300 each month to run but it has never received any grant funding, despite Tveeder's status as an essential media monitoring tool for the PM’s team.
"We can see why the PM's office find the service so useful,” he said.
"It’s great for monitoring what other politicians are saying at doorstops, and press conferences - without having to watch every minute of television.
"Perhaps we can apply for a government innovation grant," he joked.
Visits to www.Tveeder.com sucked down more bandwidth than visits to prominent news websites (coded in black in the chart below) and major data exchanges (aquamarine) in the year since Mr Turnbull took office.
Without the “www” prefix the website was also 35th on the list, meaning the combined traffic for the two combined would have pushed Tveeder into the top 10.
Watching a single channel on Tveeder for an hour consumes around 6mb of bandwidth.
Bandwidth hogs
The list also shows the Prime Minister’s staff have been spending time on Canberra’s largest real estate website AllHomes (39th).
But perhaps the most staggering insight provided by the list is the dominance of advertising and user tracking websites.
The list serves as a reminder that the download quotas of Australians are being dominated by background marketing activity.
International marketing company Lotame run the largest such site on the list - bcp.crwdcntrl.net - but did not answer inquiries from SBS about how exactly humans benefit from such a huge data exchange.
According to SBS analysis, of the top 50 domains, 19 are used for advertising technology. One third of the total traffic counted in this list is gobbled up by these services.
Peeking inside government
The information was quietly released to Senators as an answer to a ‘question on notice’ last week as part of the Senate Estimates process, but was not formally made available to the public until Tuesday.
Former Labor Senator Joe Ludwig has been seeking similar information from dozens of Departments for several years.
The release of the list reflects a more transparent approach from the PM's department. Mr Ludwig asked for the same information in 2014 when Tony Abbott was Prime Minister, but was rebuffed because it would have been an "unreasonable diversion of departmental resources”.
In the interests of transparency, SBS can also reveal its most visited websites.
They are advertising or tracking sites advertising.com, springserve.com, adnxs.com and cheartbeat.net, along with Google and the SBS website.
Call out
Do you administer network access for your organisation? Direct message @jacksongs on Twitter to share what domains are the surprising bandwidth-hogs in your workplace for a future story. No information will be published without obtaining your express permission.
