The judges took a field of over forty entries, split over two locations, in this year’s GovHack and came away with over a dozen winners spread over a similar number of categories.
That’s plenty of projects to choose from, and we’ll showcase a few of them here. As a general warning, use a webkit-based browser for these projects; many of them failed or performed poorly for me in Firefox.
We’ll open with TheOpenBudget, a visualisation that shows how taxpayer money is distributed by the Federal Government. It took out the Best Open Government Award. After seeing a couple of similar US-centric visualisations, it’s nice to have one that’s directly relevant.
Not all of the winners were visually stunning. Winner of Best API Development for Government Data Sets, Best Contribution to Open Data (Canberra) and Best Use of Bureau of Meteorology Data Sets was WeatheredOak. The team consolidated historical weather data, which was split across 112 weather stations and 224 temperature files, into a single database. Check out the GovHack website to view average temperatures (the format for dates is YYYYMMDD), or grab the 22MB MSSQL backup file and poke around, yourself.
Taking out the award for Best Use of Archives Data Set was team Double Rainbows, with their PhotoSearch for National Archives Australia. This entry is nice and polished, but needs a webkit browser for the year sliders.
Taking out the Canberran version of the archives data set award, as well as Best Benefit to the ACT Community and Best Augmented Reality Hack, was the History in ACTION project. It allows users to create their own bus tour to explore Canberra’s history. View the source to see how the website makes use of a thumping SVG, which powers the magic.
Other projects to look at are the Happiness Index, its Google Fusion visualisation, and the below visualisation from 3D Data on a Mesh of 55,845 data observations from the Bureau of Meteorology:
For the full list of winners, see the winners blog post on GovHack’s website.
Update: a complete list of all entries and URLs is available at eGov AU.
