PlanningAlerts.com is run by volunteers if you would like to get involved we'd love to here from you:

I am a programmer and want to add my local authority

You can help by writing a screen scraper for your local authority that was can import into plannignalerts.com. There are only 2 criteria for the screen scraper:

1. That it can output data in the following format: http://www.planningalerts.com/lambeth.xml
2. That it can accept a query sting in the format day=X&month=Y&year=Z

Other than that it's up to you. It can be in any language. You can host them yourself or we can host it for you.

I work for a local authority and would like to make our data available

The most important thing you can do is publish your data in a simple format that is freely available on the internet. Something like this is good but we can work with most formats. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss how you can help.