Date:
10 November 2021
Author:
Phillipa Martin

2021 GovHack — digital government services

This year, one of the GovHack categories was ‘Reimagining Digital Government Services’, which ties in well with digital transformation in government. There were also many other government-focused categories, with lots of wonderful looking projects. View 2021 winnersExternal Link to see all the innovative and useful open data prototypes.

DigiKey — winner

The winner in the digital government services category was DigiKey. DigiKey is a web app that can be used across Australia to check-in, share data and get up-to-date Covid-19 information, including exposure sites. The user can control what data to share in specific situations, and the tool can be used across jurisdictions.

When checking in, users can select what data they’d like to share (e.g. name, address, phone number, vaccination data and TFN) and they can also access info on the restrictions that currently apply in the state/location, and current exposure sites. The DigiKey API pulls together a number of data sources, to populate this data. Different government jurisdictions can make available current restrictions, notices, important information, vaccination hubs, and so on via an API.

More about DigiKeyExternal Link

Project SMRT — runner-up

Project SMRT is a platform that facilitates engagement between elected officials and citizens. Citizens can sign up to areas that interest them and easily see when that topic was discussed in Parliament, accessing what was discussed and/or decided.

The platform follows a three-stage process:

  1. Generating information chunks — using machine learning (ML) algorithms, the Parliament video stream is broken into 60-second video snippets.

  2. Matching with public datasets — datasets (public APIs) from sources such as the ABS and data.gov.au are matched to the citizen’s interest area.

  3. Citizen dashboard view — citizens view the information relevant to them, including visualisations like bar graphs and word clouds.

More about Project SMRTExternal Link

MyBus — runner-up

MyBus is a Tasmanian-based phone app that uses real-time bus data coupled with the ability to pre-pay for trips to provide a more efficient bus service. Users login to the app and use the plan my journey feature to see potential bus times. They can then pay for their journey and see, in real-time, where their bus is and if it’s running on time.

More about MyBusExternal Link

Salsa Digital’s take

We’ve always been keen GovHack enthusiasts and have been involved in this wonderful initiative as both sponsors and entrants in the past. See our blog Giving back to GovHackExternal Link for more information. We’d like to congratulate this year’s winners, runner-ups and honourable mentions across all categories. We suggest you check out the other Aussie GovHack winnersExternal Link to see open data innovation in action.

About GovHack

GovHack is an annual event (competition) that uses government open data to create working prototypes. It started in 2009 and operates across Australia and New Zealand. More about GovHackExternal Link