A suite of inspiring and practical land management products created thanks to open environmental monitoring and assessment data from TERN and its NCRIS partners have been recognised at the annual GovHack awards.
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| TERN and the NCRIS Research Data and Infrastructure Group supported the ‘Paddock to Plate Hack’, which was won by the Toowoomba Trio, for their John Conner project which provides a timely warning system for farmers when a heat stress event has likely occurred |
The annual GovHack awards were presented on 22nd October at the State Library in Adelaide. GovHack is an annual ‘hackathon’ competition where participants create programs, apps and useful products using openly accessible government data.
Teams work together over a 46 hour period to explore, mash up, ideate and communicate concepts. It’s a competition, and there are prizes, but GovHack is a friendly creative environment.
The best teams have a mix of skills to help contribute to all the competition elements including skills to story boarding ideas, building prototypes and creating a video pitch of your winning idea!
GovHack is for everyone! All sorts of people join GovHack, including entrepreneurs, developers, data analysts, engineers, designers, digital media creators, artists, film makers, story tellers, academics, researchers, youth and civic enthusiasts!
The red carpet awards ceremony was a black tie event held in the Hogwarts library-esque surroundings of the State Libraries impressive Mortlock Gallery.
“It was an inspiring event,” said Professor Andrew Lowe, from the University of Adelaide and TERN’s former Associate Science Director. “It’s great to see so many young students and professionals generating really useful products from openly available data, that until a few years ago was locked behind firewalls and password protection.”
The event receives support from the big end of town and in addition to sponsorship from NCRIS partners (TERN, ALA, NeCTAR, RDS, NCI), Google, IAG, BoM, Ancestry, GeoScience Australia, IP Australia and IBM all support the event, to name a few.
This year NCRIS Research Data and Infrastructure Group supported the ‘Paddock to Plate Hack’, which was won by the Toowoomba Trio, for their John Conner project which provides a timely warning system for farmers when a heat stress event has likely occurred. They integrated data from ABS, BoM and the Qld goverment.
Second prize in this category went to Tinman for the Fivemind project – a land management and bushfire mitigation tool, which uses Satellite imagery to automatically detect changes in vegetation and combines information with terrain and climate data to produce a spatial bush fire risk assessment.
Honorable mentions in this category went to Team Earthlings for Climate Flow, Totally Original for Agricultura and Torange Juice for Greenu.
The NCRIS Research Data and Infrastructure Group also supported the ‘NCRIS Data’ category won by Yamm for Critrs, a game which place players on a map of their local area based on their geolocation. Open source data of known animals in the area are then introduced to the game where players have the chance to capture the animal on camera using Augmented Reality, which overlays the animal on the real world, creating a truly immersive experience. A kind of Pokémon Go for real animals. An honorable mention in this category went to GaiaXplorers.
Published in TERN newsletter November 2016
