The weekend just past featured the 6th GovHack event, involving over 2,000 participants in 280 teams across 41 locations in Australia and New Zealand working on 439 registered projects. Effectively the world’s biggest government hackathon, GovHack includes some amazing ideas on how to solve public challenges, using open data from agencies in innovative ways. Whether…
This is a guest post written by Rosie Williams, a leading Australian Open Data Developer and Citizen Journalist, who created and manages infoAus.net and writes for NoFibs.com.au. It’s republished with her permission. Can open data really form the basis of a social good startup in Australia? I’ve come round to the realisation that doing open…
In business if no-one will pay for a product it ceases being made, or never gets off the drawing board. Government doesn’t quite work the same – many government functions and services are designed as ‘public goods’ – things we all need, but that many ‘customers’ cannot or would not pay for. This includes services…
Late last week the shortlisted start-ups for the DataStart program were released – here’s why it’s significant and what happens next. In November 2015 the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, in parternship with Pollenizer Ventures, announced Australia’s first open data commercialisation competition, DataStart. Designed as a pilot to test the approach, entrepreneurs, data scientists…
Now that Australians are heading out of holiday mode, it’s a good time for a reminder about the Australian Government’s process to become a member of the global Open Government Partnership (OGP), through developing our first OGP National Action Plan. If you’ve not heard of the Open Government Partnership, in a nutshell it’s an international…
While successive Australian governments have touted ‘evidence-based policy’, a significant ongoing challenge within Australia’s public service has been generating or accessing the right data at the right time – particularly across agencies – for actually testing policy assumptions and following a more agile policy development process. I’ve personally witnessed the challenges within agencies of being…
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have just announced a series of information sessions regarding the Open Government Partnership and the process by which the Australian government is seeking to involve the community and civil organisations in the development of our first National Action Plan by the end of June 2016. For information on…
Rosie Williams of OpenAus recently released her latest open data project, Open Charities, to provide insight into the financials of Australian charities. The service integrates the available open data from 53,000 registered Australian charities in a way never done before, allowing fast and simple analysis of charities by location, electorate and issue. To fund this work…
This is a guest post written by Rosie Williams, a leading Australian Open Data Developer and Citizen Journalist, who created and manages infoAus.net and writes for NoFibs.com.au. It’s republished from OpenAus with her permission. The Power to Persuade blog fosters new ways to collaborate across sectors for better social policy. Power to Persuade recently published a post of mine on…
I’ve been reading various views and reflecting on the DataStart competition. There’s a shift I’ve been observing in how some people in government talk about open data that is making me quite uncomfortable. I like that the commercial world is finally taking note of the value of open data and the prospect to build businesses using it….
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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