Canberra Smart City Ready for GovHack 2016 Data Mash Up


Released 29/07/2016

The ACT Government would like to announce its support and participation in this year’s GovHack challenge. This year the ACT Government is sponsoring two categories at the GovHack 2016 challenge, a fitting event for Canberra the Smart City.

The GovHack challenge is a platform to promote the use of the government’s open data, particularly data from our Manuka Smart Parking Trial and ACT foundation spatial datasets.  

Through the ACT Geospatial Catalogue the public can access 95 (and counting) open ACT Government Geospatial data from land administration data such as districts and blocks to emergency management data such as 100 year floods and bushfire fire management zones. Through dataACT there are many other datasets available from smart parking locations, on-road cyclist crashes to live data on air quality monitoring.

The Smart Parking dataset will be available in two ways, historical data and live occupancy data. The Smart Parking Trial is running in Manuka entertainment precinct until April 2017. It includes 460 infra-red parking bay sensors, five LED parking availability street signs and the ParkCBR app (available on GooglePlay and AppStore) to reduce congestion on-street. This trial will evaluate the ability of the Smart Parking program to provide timely parking information to drivers, decrease congestion and improve user experience.

Both these dataset sources, the ACT Geospatial Catalogue and Smart Parking Trial, are programs from our Digital Canberra direction. Through Digital Canberra we are committed to capitalising on the opportunities of the digital age to drive economic growth, provide better services and strengthen open government and citizen engagement.

Our support and involvement with GovHack 2016 follows on from our recent Proactive Release of Data Policy launched late last year.

The ACT is one of the first Australian jurisdictions to develop a central open data portal for public access and continue to release accessible, timely, reusable, trusted and sustainable public data.  

Data is the lifeblood of digital. Liberating open data to sponsor innovation by social entrepreneurs and the business community is a very exciting prospect. It will be great to see what innovations the best minds in Canberra will come up as we provide more and more open data.

GovHack is all about getting our best and brightest from across Australia and New Zealand working with open government data with a focus to innovate and create.

As a Smart City, the ACT is proud to be associated with an event that is all about encouraging and celebrating our technical and creative capacity, connecting citizens with government for great outcomes, and building upon the social and economic value of open data published by government.

GovHack is a non-stop 46 hour event held simultaneously around Australia and New Zealand at approved official locations and community nodes: From 7pm (tonight) Friday 29 July through to 5pm Sunday 31 July 2016. To access the wide range of freely available government data view www.data.act.gov.au and www.actmapi.act.gov.au

- Statement ends -

ACT Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate | Media Releases

Media Contacts

Name Phone Mobile Email

Alexandra Magee

(02) 6207 2464

0401 766 218

alexandra.magee@act.gov.au


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