Winning Govhack

So, a while back (July) I thought I’d go to GovHack. It was my second ever hackfest, the first being a much smaller affair in Miramar. Personally I regard Miramar as a win because I emerged with a stupid script that announced plane arrivals on twitter and a piece of electronics that actually works. Worked. Whatever.

Anyway. So I pitch up to GovHack with no team but the intention to join one that looks like it doesn’t have enough developers. Which I did, and somehow ended up working with a bunch of (deeply lovely) BI and ETL people from Intergen and Jo from Hexagon. Together we are…. TREMORZ!!.

The basic idea was to improve communications in a time of emergency. We learned this from the Christchurch quake: some people have stuff (spare beds) and some people have needs (somewhere to sleep).

Long story short we made a quick app that connects “needs” (red) and “haves” (green) geographically. Purple are ‘municipal’ facilities. What you do is tap to show where you are (or where you happen to be caring about right now) and a list of, basically, want ads appear — sorted by distance. Click on one of those for details and a tiny little map. Dead easy.

So the BI posse got serious on getting data together and did an astounding job of chasing, scraping, ETL’ing and — well — plain ordinary just making stuff up so we had some data to play with. Jo bodged together a backend using some work thing. And we even had time after “shipping” to chase judges around going “look! look! it actually works!”.

It was at least moderately well received, stood out a little in a sea of webapps and stuff that doesn’t work and we won a prize!

This was apparently enough to have us be considered for the International prize and, well, tadaa! (the title being a bit of a spoiler).

Our man Jo went to collect the chocolates and perfected the art of actually being surprised.

Beer still in hand, a true Kiwi.

So at the end of the day we’ve not really done anything with it (other than open source the various bits and pieces). I can’t face dealing with local government; {{another_company}} didn’t really want to partner and, frankly, had no idea what it even meant. We won a few hundred bucks each and still go out for drinks from time to time.

So, yeah, good craic. I’m not sure I have it in me to do another though :)