2013 has been a packed year for the OKFN Melbourne team. Here are a few highlights.
The year began with a data journalism day hosted by The Age prior to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Melbourne lecture. The day brought together storytellers with data wranglers to coax the news out of a number of large datasets with the help of The Age’s data journalists including ambassador Craig Butt.
In Melbourne, we love maps and map-making has been a theme this year. Following the success of the data newsroom, we held the first of a series of TileMill workshops. Assisted by Steve Bennett, teams made custom maps of Melbourne, exploring everything from cycle paths to the city’s famous street art. One of the maps, featuring black spots for bike accidents, was featured on The Age’s data blog. We’ve since gone on to run map-making for researchers at Melbourne University, where maps presenting everything from Aboriginal Australian rock art to Tibetan language groups have been lovingly constructed.
The middle of the year saw over twenty Melbourne teams compete in GovHack, where our theme was Beautiful Data. Over a packed weekend, teams explored data ranging from immigration statistics, population growth, and water quality in the Yarra to distribution of whale species in Australian waters. You can read some of co-organiser David Flanders’ reflections on the outcomes of GovHack 2013 on his blog. Planning is already underway for GovHack 2014, which promises to be bigger than ever.
The weekend of hacking (and presentation of prizes) wasn’t the end of the GovHack story. At the beginning of September, we brought together some of our GovHackers with representatives of the Victorian and Australian government and OKFN co-founder Dr Rufus Pollock. We discussed the lessons and challenges for the open data community and heard again and again that pdfs are not what’s needed! By the end of the afternoon’s discussions, we’d agreed that we need to build the relationships between the producers and consumers of government data to drive reuse.
The Melbourne team with Dr Rufus Pollock and Pia Waugh (L-R Dr Maia Sauren, Steve Bennett, Dr Fiona Tweedie, Dr Rufus Pollock, David Flanders, Craig Butt, Front – Pia Waugh)
Inspired by Rufus’ exhortations to build cathedrals of knowledge, next stop was HealthHack. Curated by Maia Sauren, this weekend brought together health researchers with developers and data experts to address some of the challenges faced by researchers in their daily work. You can read more about HealthHack here. At the subsequent showcase of outcomes, one of the researchers said she had become a ‘born-again HealthHacker’, which suggests we achieved our mission of showing researchers what’s possible with some custom-built tools. We’re planning another HealthHack for next May.
We hadn’t forgotten about the comments from the GovHack showcase, and in December Steve led the first of what we hope will be a series of ‘meet the data-owner’ events. We brought together over 50 data enthusiasts to meet some of the team from VicRoads to talk about what data the community would most like to see released and how VicRoads can work more closely with data consumers. We’re excited to be working with the team from data.vic and are planning more similar meet ups.
As well as events, the OKFN Melbourne team have been spreading the word about our work and building links with similar communities across Melbourne. Members of the team have spoken at events such as NerdNite Melbourne, the Australian Computer Society and Link Festival.
We’ve benefited hugely from the support of The Age and the University of Melbourne this year, as well as our event sponsors and many supporters along the way. After a short break, we’re looking forward to another exciting year of open knowledge, along with plenty of dumplings and Campari, in 2014.