Governments collect and publish enormous amounts of data, but have limited resources to get it into the hands of their citizens in engaging ways.
GovHack is an event to draw together people from government, industry, academia and of course, the general public to mashup, reuse, and remix government data. GovHack is about finding new ways to do great things and encouraging open government and open data.
GovHack 2014 Perth kicked off at 6pm On Friday 11th July with a launch event, dinner and then team building. With over 1300 participants nationally and more than 100 locally vying for $85k worth of prizes, this was set to be an exciting competition.
Nationally there were more than 200 projects created, with 18 from Perth. a couple of the local examples were, Australia On Drugs with a visualisation of the 2010 National Drugs Strategy Household Survey dataset, Crime & Space who looked at what affected levels and types of crimes in WA.
Teams worked through until Sunday night when they all had their chance to present their short video summary of their idea and pitch.
Six local high profile judges from Government (DAFF, DPC, Landgate) and Industry (IBM, Microsoft, Telstra) decided on the following winners;
- Sarbii – WA Govt Bigger Picture Thinking – Winner
- DrugsInOz – WA Govt Bigger Picture Thinking – Runner up
- Mash Academy – WA Govt Innovation Prize – Winner
- Rain Parrot – WA Govt Innovation Prize – Runner Up
- ClueGo – Landgate Location Innovation – Winner
- Acme Crimelab – Landgate Location Innovation – Runner Up
- GovTroll – IBM Prize for Engaging Communities – Winner
- Walk About – IBM Prize for Engaging Communities – Runner up
- Botaniser – Telstra Across the State Prize
- BusHack – iVEC Big & Complex Data Prize
- Goldfields Through Time – Spirit of Govhack
- Kieran Mesquita – Govhack Perth Promising Young Hacker
The Highlighted Perth Projects were;
- Sarbii – http://www.sarbii.com/ – Sarbi
i is a search and rescue management portal that allows the emergency service authorities to manage the coordination of a search & rescue, whilst also offering a public facing mobile app for members of the public to ‘check-in’ their journeys. - GovTroll – http://govtroll.herokuapp.com/
– Find out which MPs are talking about issues you care about, and communicate with them on social media. Search Hansard debates, and get related quotes and who said them. Send messages to politicians via Twitter or Facebook. Automatically share your message with friends on Twitter or Facebook. View messages others have sent. - Mash Academy – http://www.hackr.academy/ –
Mash Academy is an online interactive portal for children, designed so that they can learn the value and importance of open data, and also gives them the opportunity to interact with the data in a fun and interactive way. No coding knowledge required. - Acme Crimelab – http://govhack.thebeatentrack.
org/index.php - DrugsInOz – http://australia-on-drugs.s3-
website-ap-southeast-2. amazonaws.com/ - BusHack – http://govhack.itmaze.com.au – Visualizing 2 months (16 million rows) of Public transport tag on/tag off data.
If you couldnt make it to the event, like us here at Startup News, you can catch up on some of the activity here. https://storify.com/
Red Carpert Awards
GovHack also decided it was time to introduce a bit more glamour to GovHack with a red carpet awards night.
Hacks will be open for voting for a month after the competition, giving more people a chance to vote and hackers a chance to promote their projects. Then a few finalists from each location will be flown to Brisbane where civic hackers, sponsors, government folk and media can all celebrate in style with the national awards livestreamed for all GovHackers to tune in on the night.
Many local event organisers will be running a pizza night in GovHack locations for the national awards and local awards to happen on the same night so check out your local event page for information on your local GovHack awards plans.
Congratulations to all the hackers, good luck for the awards night, and carn Perth!
