Students hacking for good

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Griffith University students as Team Gov Hat at GovHack 2013
Congratulations to our Griffith University Multimedia & IT students who as Team Gov Hat received a $1000 prize for the Spirit of GovHack in the 2013 competition on the Gold Coast.

Gold Coast students of Multimedia and Information Technology from Griffith University pulled together a crack team of computer programmers, app developers and designers to compete in GovHack 2013.

The aim of GovHack is to fill a room with as many web and applications developers interested in open government as possible and let them loose on government data sets to create new mashups, data visualisations and web applications.

The event took place on June 1 and 2 across Australia in Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Hobart, Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, with more than $170,000 in prize money on offer for the main prize draw on Thursday 6 June.

Teams collaborated and competed to develop the most original and relevant products across 4 themes including: Open Government, Digital Humanities, Science and Data Journalism.

The result was more than 1000 registered participants taking part, including about 700 hackers and 130 competition entries all competing for their share of glory, and the prize money.

Jordan Gardiner a second year Multimedia student, was team leader for the Griffith University team known as the GovHats, included fellow Griffith Multimedia & IT students Matt Patterson, Jake Sieben, Jazz Ernest, Jessica Mills, Hayden Moulds, Bentley O’Kane-Chase.

“We focussed on issues and outcomes that could benefit the Gold Coast, in particular tourism which is such an important industry here,” Mr Gardiner said.

“We grabbed a bunch of Gold Coast City Council data on topics like crime and population to develop a web application that could help visitors and locals to navigate their way through the safest locations on the Gold Coast whilst avoiding the worst,” said Jordan.

“In fact, we received the ‘Spirit of GovHack’ award for the team effort put into our project and with that comes $1000 prize money to split between us all. It was the only award announced last night as all further awards will be announced this coming Thursday night June 6 from 4.30pm at Robina.”

The prize winners will be published on the 2013 Prizes page by 6pm Thursday June 6.

For details see: http://www.govhack.org/

More information about the team – http://govhat.jordsta.com/pages/documentation

Team Gov Hat at GovHack 2013 in action
The Gov Hat team from Griffith are: Jordan Gardiner – 2nd year Bachelor of Multimedia, Matt Patterson – 2nd year Bachelor of IT, Jake Sieben – 1st year Bachelor of IT, Jazz Ernest – 2nd year Bachelor of IT/Multimedia,
Jessica Mills – 2nd year Bachelor of IT/Multimedia, Bentley O’Kane-Chase – 3rd year Bachelor of Multimedia

 

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