GovHack met members of the Casey community over a three day even held in Narre Warren.
Around 50 people attended over the three days including participants, mentors, volunteers and Council officials.
There were seven teams competing this year, many of whom took on the Casey ‘Movers and Shakers challenge’. Some notable projects included students from Federation University who won the ‘Best of Casey’ award for their work completing a project on road maintenance that could utilise Internet of Things devices. A team of talented students also attended from Haileybury College and these students created a neural network for making efficient decisions on how to increase local employment. Another team created a portal for correlating disparate data sets and trending the data in Power BI.
“Enthusiasm was very high when the participants, mentors and volunteers arrived for the launch of GovHack Casey 2018,” City of Casey transformation office manager Clint Allsop said.
“This year’s participants came from a variety of industries and institutions including entrepreneurs, developers, data analysts, engineers, designers, digital media creators, artists, film makers, story tellers, academics, researchers, youth and civic enthusiasts.
“After a weekend of working with government data to invent and create, all participants managed to lodge a project by the 5pm deadline on Sunday which is a fantastic achievement.”
Mr Allsop said for Council to operate as efficiently as possible while delivering for such a large and growing municipality, they must evolve and use data as effectively as possible.
“Hosting GovHack and being a state sponsor enabled Council to gather talented people to collaborate, share ideas and propose solutions to local Casey community challenges,” he said.
GovHack is a huge international event that brings people together to innovate, collaborate and apply their creative skills to open government data.
It is run in a number of different locations across Australia and New Zealand. The City of Casey is one of them.
The event gathered creative people, entrepreneurs, government and industry personnel to collaborate and work with government data to invent and create.
