NEWSROOM

GovHack opens up data despite lockdown

24 September 2020

GovHack is the largest open data hackathon in the southern hemisphere. It aims to bring together people of all abilities who seek to make life better through open data. Usually, in multiple cities across Australia and New Zealand, hackathons would run where participants would come together in venues to form teams, agree on projects, and participate in an open data competition. However, 2020 has been anything except usual. 

The 2020 Auckland GovHack hackathon was due to take place in the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Unleash Space. When a second lockdown was announced a couple of days before it was due to run, current University of Auckland Science student Zac Miller-Waugh and co-organiser Akash Jatan hustled to move the event online. Participants included current students and staff of the University of Auckland as well as members of the public.

Unleash Space Manager Sean Kelly says that Zac made an outstanding effort in pivoting given the challenges he faced, with some great results. “I’m really impressed by what teams such as MSDchat were able to accomplish. If I take a design thinking approach I can see empathy and an identified problem that their solutions address.”

Zac says “The teams put in a great deal of effort and the outcomes are pretty fantastic. We’ll be organising a dinner meetup post-COVID to celebrate all of the awesome teams and projects created, and are hopeful we’ll get to see some of these projects featured in the national and international awards.”

Ideas from Auckland GovHack included:

• Checkon.Life – A dashboard for your local community, including things like toilet paper stock status at your local supermarkets. 
• MyMSDChat – A chatbot to help automate and simplify some difficult aspects of using the Work and Income New Zealand phone lines and site, some of which are being aggravated by current increased demand.
• AccessMap –  Highlighting the need for better datasets related to accessibility.
  “We are passionate about accessibility and wanted to address it at GovHack this year. However, after looking through the list of open government datasets on Friday evening, we realised that there were virtually no dataset’s that directly addressed barriers to accessibility.”
• Dear Diary – an app to help direct neuro-atypical children towards games/studies that work with them.
• NZ Pandemics – History and Future – A look back at the Spanish Flu 100 years ago in an artistic project designed to draw parallels to the current outbreak of COVID.
• WISER – a tool designed to help those new to financial responsibility get a grip on Kiwisaver.