Sunday, June 03, 2012

Reinventing the Australian Government in Sydney

Greetings from GovHack at Macquarie University in Sydney There are about 50 people here for the final session of the weekend event. Currently we are watching presentations from the Canberra node, where there are about another 100 people. They are showing applications using interesting combinations of government data in news ways: turning weather data into 2D jewelery, combining bus stop data with geographic databases to plot the easiest walking route to the bus stop. One of the most sophisticated proposals was Peter Chen's "WatChr" political analysis tool. Another application of notes was "Walk My Way", to encourage people to walk part of their journey before catching the bus.

A summary of the GovHack projects will be presented to GovCamp at University of Canberra on Tuesday:

ps: One of the more unusual uses of government data was an analysis of a proposal for a solar powered very fast train from Sydney to Canberra. This seemed fanciful, but developments in lithium iron batteries, developed for cars have made the batterers large enough to be considered for trains. Obviously the solar panels would not be located on the train but alongside.

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