GovHack – a resounding success!

I went along to the GovHack event last weekend along with Pia, which was pretty amazing! It ended up being about 150 people all up, with a smaller group of dedicated hackers (in the good sense) doing some pretty amazing development work over about 24 hours, mashing up government data sets in new and interesting ways. Three core themes seemed to emerge from the efforts:

1. transparency of government: for example the  functions, decisions, people and processes of government;
2. human convenience: for example the location of public toilets, comparison data of suburbs, finding local facilities; amd
3. user empowerment: for example the ability to submit information about public toilets, to create a personalised list of local facilities, and to find all your political representatives across all spheres of government.

We created a three part video which includes behind the scenes interviews with participants, the coordinator John Allsop, and judges from the day. We also included screenshots and screencasts of all the projects created throughout the day, so check them out here:

It was great seeing Pia in action at Govhack! – not only working with me to make the video, but spending time on her laptop creating cool stuff! As a result, we have a mashup showing all ACT Government spending (including stimulus spending, grants, infrastructure, etc) that is almost finished. Unfortunately, a lot of data had to be manually extracted from PDFs, so it wasn’t ready for presentation at GovHack, however it will be submitted to the Mashup Australia competition (go Pia!). She says (modestly) that there are far better examples of mashups already, but we think this will be a useful resource anyway

Feedback is very welcome, and make sure you check out the Mashup Australia website and submit your mashups! You can also vote for your favourite mashups.

Remember there are also more mashup events coming up, notably:

• the OpenAustralia Hackfest – The MashupAustralia Edition this Saturday November 7 & 8, Sydney from 11AM-8PM, and
• the Melbourne Hack Day with Web Directions and Lonely Planet also this Saturday November 7 & 8 in Melbourne, from 10AM

And remember also the Mashup Australia competition is open for entries till 4PM Friday, 13^th November 2009.

Tagged: ACT, Canberra, egovernment, gov20, government, ICT, open government