A message for GovHack participants

Suneel Jethani
Digital Government Victoria
3 min readSep 6, 2019

This weekend hundreds of people across Australia will come together to share ideas, develop new skills and work on new and creative ways to address a broad range of social, economic and environmental challenges at Gov Hack, the Southern Hemispheres biggest annual celebration of open data.

As a challenge sponsor and a judge, this is my message to participants.

Let me tell you about one of the best and, at the same time, the worst parts of my job as engagement manager for a state government open data program: trying to demonstrate the potential of what can be done with open data once it has been released. While there’s no shortage of excellent case studies from around the world, it’s difficult to justify to data-publishing agencies if all the effort of preparing data for public release is really worth it.

This is why I really enjoy being involved in Gov Hack. It makes it easy to demonstrate exactly why opening data up for reuse is worth it. The quality and ingenuity of the work that Gov Hack participants do over the short period of 48 hours never fails to amaze me. Gov Hack entries give me the evidence I need to demonstrate that there’s lots of untapped potential in open government data. If someone can prototype something really cool over a weekend then imagine what could be done with a little more time and support?

With my colleagues in the Digital Design and Innovation Branch and Department of Premier and Cabinet, I design the Victorian Government Challenges and Coordinate the judging of the entries. This involves watching literally hundreds of your three-minute pitch videos. So it is with some degree of confidence that I can say: I think I know how you can win Gov Hack — although I can’t code.

So here’s my advice:

  • Think about the fit between the “thing” you’re designing and the impact you’re hoping to make in the problem space?
  • Avoid jumping straight into a solution. How appropriate is the technology you’re building for the context in which it will be used?
  • Think about the bigger picture when you’re trying to understand the problem-space. Try to understand different cause and effect relations associated with the challenge.
  • Don’t forget that the process of arriving at your final idea is an important part of the story you tell in the pitch. We want to know how you did what you did, what problems did you encounter and how did you overcome them?
  • Think about how you’re enriching the data you’re using and how it might be made available for people to re-use in the future.

GovHack is now in its 10th year. A decade on we’re faced with a much more complex data ecosystem and more advanced tools. I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

--

--

Suneel Jethani
Digital Government Victoria

Academic working on open data, self-tracking and the politics of everyday life.