GovHack Geraldton – Friday kick-off event

The GovHack competition is about using our technical and creative capacity, to build useful things from open data published by government. Put simply, it’s like a fun (digital) recycling project, just making beautiful and useful things out of undervalued spreadsheets or datasets rather than spare parts from the tip.

Friday night in Geraldton will be an exciting, collaborative event.

We’ve designed this to suit whether you’re committing your weekend or just dropping in. At this event, we’ll be encouraging participation, throwing around the ideas for data and creating project teams, who will then work together over Saturday and Sunday to “hack” their data into a visual form, whether that is in charts, infographics, online apps or something else completely.

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As well as RSVP to this event with Pollinators, ALL participants MUST register on GovHack website: http://portal.govhack.org/locations/wa/geraldton.html

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Activities on the Agenda include:

• Networking – meet other participants, mentors, sponsors,
• Inspiration – short showcases of winning projects, webcast connection to GovHack nodes around the country,
• Briefing – understand the rules, prizes, deadlines if you are aiming to compete,
• Discussion – discussing what’s possible for this type of event and our region,
• Collaboration – competition categories are announced at 7pm, and teams can form, focus and get working.

For participants and teams, Friday evening is the start of our 46 hour journey, using open government data to prove a concept that can make a meaningful change in our region. In that time they have to to create a project page, proof of concept and a video that tells the story of how government data can be reused.

Previous years’ GovHack entries from across Australia and New Zealand have included art, jewellery, a digital sign, a board game, historic film pieces, a virtual reality game,  a 3d model, a visualisation of data, an informed article and web apps.

Everyone is welcome to re-convene for the Sunday night showcase.

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Some inspiration from 2015. You can review all the winners here: https://archive.govhack.org/2015-winners/

• WA winners https://archive.govhack.org/2015-winners/#Western_Australia
• Minecraft your city http://2015.hackerspace.govhack.org/content/minecraft-your-city
• IoTransport http://2015.hackerspace.govhack.org/content/iotransport
• Question Time a game of policy http://2015.hackerspace.govhack.org/content/question-time-game-policy