Share in over $30,000 worth of prizes by participating in GovHack 2012

With a strong focus on government data, GovHack is inviting teams of programmers and designers to invent new and better ways of delivering government data to Australians and will be rewarding the best apps, data mash-ups, and data visualisations with a share of $30,000 in prize money.

The event, being held in Canberra and Sydney from 1st - 3rd June, will challenge teams to answer the question and develop solutions for 'how can government data be better used to benefit Australians?'

The organisers have secured over thirty thousand dollars in prize money through sponsorships, although Pia Waugh, the chief organiser is tight-lipped about the prize categories, "We want people to come with fresh ideas and concepts and to build them at GovHack using publicly released data from government agencies. To keep the playing field level, we won’t tell anyone the prize categories until the event."

In previous years GovHack winners have found ways to compare government lobbying with the results of successful tenders, and designed mobile apps to help people find the nearest public toilet.

"This is a unique opportunity to be a part of generating ideas for how government can better use and re-use the wealth of information hidden away in its databases. By being a part of this event the participants get to, in a small way, directly influence how government data managers will look at and manage their data stores" Pia said.

GovHack is being supported by organisations including Adobe, MailChimp, Palantir and some of the biggest data holders in the Australian Government are providing prize money and data, including the National Archives of Australia, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), and the Bureau of Meteorology.

GovHack is an official part of 2012 APS Innovation week, with the support of the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education.

You can now register to participate, review the competition rules, or see an outline of the data to be made available on the GovHack site (http://www.govhack.org).

Prize categories will be announced at the event's opening on Friday 1st June.

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GovCamp Queensland 2012 liveblog

I am in Brisbane all day today at GovCamp Queensland with roughly 200 Queensland public servants and will be liveblogging the event as far as possible, plus capturing the twitter feed for the day (which uses #GovCampQld).

Follow all the excitement below.

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GovHack returns - as part of Amped

Last year Australia's Gov 2.0 Taskforce initiated the GovHack event, produced by Web Directions, to showcase what could be done with open government data.

This year I'm glad to see that GovHack is returning - as part of Amped, a free 10 hour hack day, in Sydney's PowerHouse Museum on Sat 16th of October.

Whether you're a web designer or developer, interaction designer, graphic designer, project manager, writer, or just someone who has has an interesting idea, Amped is an opportunity to strut your stuff and create something of value.

Amped is fully catered, will have expert mentors on hand. The grand prize for the best hack is a trip for the winning team to Tokyo's Web Directions East.

RSVP at the Amped website.

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Are you a citizen of Australia, New Zealand, the US, the UK, Google or Facebook? Blurring governments and companies

Many people consider Google as a search engine, or maybe as a search and email system, with a few extra frills like maps.

However with over 1 billion searches a day, Google is not only aggregating the world's knowledge, it is learning about the world's citizens, what interests them, how they think and feel - even how well they are. It is now becoming possible to track the spread of diseases via Google searches with a high degree of accuracy, or model political sentiment.

These techniques are still in their infancy, however over time Google is building mental maps for billions of the world's citizens. The company is hiring the best and brightest engineers, mathematicians and psychologists in the world in order to make more sense of this data and improve their predictions - apparently to help improve the targeting of advertisements.

Google is also a more complex entity than it first appears in the clean Google search interface. The company is involved in a vast array of businesses connected to how the internet operates, is powered and the services delivered across it, such as power generation, broadband networks, connection devices and operation systems, electronic healthcare and biotechnology. In many respects the company is heading towards becoming a global operating system for the planet.

Alongside Google is Facebook - the world's leading social networking site. However rather than just being a place to chat with your friends online and share photos, Facebook has much grander ambitions.

Facebook now has almost 500 million active users - more than half accessing it daily. The service's users spend more time engaging with and through the service than they spend engaging with their national and state governments.

Facebook's advertising engine learns every time a user interacts with the service and even learns about people who do not have accounts by how they are mentioned in photos, videos and updates by users. This makes it a tool for achieving the same depth of audience understanding as Google is developing through its search and other services.

Last week Facebook and Microsoft launched a partnership which will allow Facebook users to create, edit, share and collaborate on documents via Microsoft's new web-based Office back end. The site is Docs.com. This isn't the traditional tool you find in a social network and could herald Facebook's entry into business life.

Also last week Facebook launched the Open Graph initiative that could see them embedding roots into many - if not most - websites, by enabling people to embed Facebook 'Like' buttons which connect back to their Facebook profiles. More than simply being a way to share your sentiment with friends, these buttons allow Facebook to know when you visit every site with a Like button, what you do and how long you spend there. Like a benevolent strangler vine, Facebook will suck knowledge about its users (including around 40% of Australians) out of potentially millions of websites in the most comprehensive data collection and reuse scheme in history - again apparently focused on ad sales.

In the past companies with this level of influence and control over a geographical territory amassed enormous political power. In some cases they effectively became the government in some areas of the world. The British East India Company springs to mind, which governed much of India for 100 years.

As the world becomes reliant on the internet as the global nervous system, where the territory is owned by companies rather than nations, I wonder whether we will see a similar situation with the potential for companies becoming governments - all but in name.

At some point will people consider themselves citizens of Google or Facebook rather than Australia, New Zealand or Great Britain?

Maybe some already do.


Below is an excellent video by the ABC's Hungry Beast that provides more information about what's under the hood at Google, and speculates about what the company could become.

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UK launches data.gov.uk (and how Australia could top it)

Just in case you missed this the other week, on 21 January the UK launched the data.gov.uk website with 2,500 government datasets available for access and reuse by the public.

This leapfrogged the US's data.gov, which now has around 1,000 datasets available.

The UK site also extends the government open data space in several other directions, with a wiki and forum supporting discussion and collaboration between people reusing datasets in the site and a Ideas tool for submitting ideas on what data should be released and how it should be combined to provide new and useful insights.

The site also includes a gallery of applications developed to make use of government data, making it a central place to locate these applications.

I believe this is the new world leader for open data websites from government - though I look forward to the day when Australia tops it (in data.gov.au).

How could we top it with data.gov.au?

Here's some ideas:

• Build in a data analysis and visualisation module that allows people without technical expertise to combine, model and view datasets, no matter their origin (like IBM's Manyeyes).
• Then allow people to embed these visualisations into their own sites.
  
• Support community submission of data that can then be shared and used by government alongside government datasets to improve insights and understanding - including allowing the appropriate Creative Commons copyright to be embedded into these datasets as part of the submission process.
• Comments on datasets - allow every set of data to support a discussion to allow people to ask questions to clarify what the dataset contains and discuss how it could be presented in a more usable way.
  
• Allow tagging of datasets and applications - so that over time there's a bottom-up folksonomy that people can use to find related data or search on, rather than relying on government metadata (which may not match the community's mental models).
• Support data correction through the site - if someone detects an error in a dataset there should be a clear path to notify the submitter of the data and have it corrected.
• Vote on applications, allowing the community to provide feedback on how useful and valuable they found them. The voting mechanism should be able to be embedded with applications in other sites, rather than rely on people returning to data.gov.au to vote.
  
• GEOmapping engine, to map locations such that they can be placed on maps, rather than having to have people build their own tools to transform the data.
  
• Collaborative data modelling projects - where the community is invited to work together to model data, assisting the government and community.
  
• Data competitions with cash prizes. Similar to the NetFlicks Prize, provide the tools for government agencies - and even commercial entities - to create competitions to solve tricky data problems through crowdsourcing.
  
• Create user profiles and including information on how many applications / data visualisations and other activities they have undertaken in relation to the data site. People respond to competitive challenge and recognition - like in the Australian National Library's Manyhands project.
• Create webinars and run physical events to raise awareness of the site and to show Australians (developers, corporates, not-for-profits, interested parties) how easy it is to reuse government data.
• Hold annual awards for the best applications, including peoples' choice awards based on user votes and awards for schools and students to encourage an interest in and innovative uses of data.

If you have other ideas on how Data.gov.au could be better than the UK and US efforts, please add them in the comments below.

To finish up - here's a good presentation from Sir Tim Berners Lee (who has led the work on data.gov.uk) on why we need to make government data available in raw reusable form, to the public.

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Last chance to vote on MashupAustralia's peoples' choice - 81 entries to choose from

MashUpAustralia had 81 entries into Australia's first competitive event for mashing up data from Australian governments.

Now that entries have closed, the public have until 4PM AEDT on 20 November to vote for a people's choice - that means you!

So if you've not yet had a look at the entries and voted, this is your LAST chance.

Go to MashUpAustralia to vote.

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And the GovHack winner is...

GovHack wrapped up tonight with drinks at CSIRO's Discovery centre.

Although many of the Govhackers had already departed for their drives and flights back to Sydney, Melbourne and other parts of Australia, around 30 people remained for the award ceremony.

At the awards, Tom Coates spoke about how only 20 years ago Tim Berners-Lee had written the document that laid out the core concept for the internet. He said that today we are seeing a whole new revolution based on the opening up of data and that this enables the community to help governments work - a transformational shift.

After deliberation, the judges gave honourable mentions to the teams
- What The Federal Government Does
- Project TeaLady
- It's Buggered, Mate

The Lonely Planet Award went to Rate My Loo for embodying the spirit of the day.

Second place went to Know where you live.

And the winning mashup was LobbyClue.

Well done to everyone involved!

Below are a few photos from the award ceremony - taken with iPhone so excuse the low resolution.


Tom Coates speaking at the GovHack award ceremony.

John Allsop (the main organiser) speaking at the GovHack award ceremony.

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A couple more great Govhacks

Here's some of the other mashups created at GovHack...

• Picture Australia location search
• What is my postcode? (View data by postcode)
• Who represents me? (System that maps addresses to their representatives and polling booths for reuse in other services)
• LobbyClue (mapping Australian political lobbyists)
  

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Govhacking in Canberra

This afternoon I've been able to spend a few hours hanging out with a group of talented web developers, designers and programmers at Canberra Uni.

They've gathered for the Gov 2.0 Taskforce sponsored GovHack event, to develop new mashup applications and services using government data released at data.australia.gov.au and data.nsw.gov.au.

There's been a great deal of creative work done, from exposing the PowerHouse's data as a service, to an application for rating ACT toilets called Rate-a-Loo to mapping government agencies by function - such as this image of Transport-related agencies, to the creation of a 'lite' Australian version of FixMyStreet, appropriately named It's Buggered, Mate.

So far around 20 mashups have been submitted - based on 24 hours work.

I'll report on the winners later today.

Here's a few photos of the day...

What some of the developers looked like after hacking through the night.

John Allsop speaking to govhackers shortly before the presentation of the mashups created over the last day.

Senator Lundy saying a few words at the GovHack event.

Tom Coates from San Francisco, who was an international guest at the Govhack event. Tom has been involved with around 12 GovHack events around the world.

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