You can’t miss the large touchscreen interactive inside the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, where you can touch and swipe your way through the history of Australia’s democracy. For those who can’t visit the building, we’ve brought the experience to the web, with Exploring Democracy, which presents an even more interactive representation of the democracy timeline, along with many more topics prepared especially for the site. You can view them as traditional timelines, or laid on a map, in a combined timeline-map mode, or search through them as lists. As well as admiring the content that the Museum has provided, you can also create an account to build your own timelines and trails, where you can mix existing milestones with ones of your own.

This was Icelab’s first major Ruby on Rails app. Using the framework allowed us to structure the data in a way that allowed them to be represented in many different forms, as well as build a custom timeline creation and management interface that could be used by both the Museum admins and members of the public. We also mashed together both the Google Maps API and the Simile Timeline widget, which we worked heavily to give it an appearance that was fitting with the overall site design.