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FLUX hosts its first hackathon, with over 400 people attending events in its first week of opening

By
Spacecubed
,
on
Aug 24, 2018

This weekend, FLUX hosted its first hackathon and Perth’s biggest GovHack ever, seeing over 175 registrations, and 128 participants to the event. This event in particular was something special, as over 400 people have now been part of all events held at FLUX in what’s only its first week of being fully open.

In the same week, Spacecubed launched its new HBF Activate programme, the Vocus Upstart Accelerator 2016 began, and the Founder Institute programme kicked off its latest semester too! It's all events at FLUX and Spacecubed at the moment, with the arrival of Steve Baxter at Spacecubed on Thursday 8th of August. 

GovHack - Record data and attendance

Kicking off on Friday with the launch night, FLUX’s BASE space was vibrant with attendees to GovHack’s event, all looking to innovate, collaborate and cowork with government data, and prototype new solutions to existing challenges with these data sets.

With 23 teams taking part in the event, including 2 from Geraldton for the first time in GovHack WA’s history, the task at hand was to create a project with the following data sets;

  • Main Roads provided crash data for the past five years, a years worth of historic data providing traffic counts, speed,  flow and occupancy and much more.
  • Water Corporation released drone data from their pipe network as well as vibration data from the movements of their pipes
  • The Insurance Commission of WA released historical compulsory third party claim data with lots of information such as location of accident, claim amount, injury etc (a very large and de-identified dataset for participants to explore)   
  • The Department of Local Government and Communities released all local government data behind mycouncil.wa.gov.au
  • The Department of Fisheries released their exclusive world leading shark research data, and provided the Manager of the Shark Response unit as a mentor

“The best part about the weekend was watching all of our sponsors, as demonstrated by the Department of Fisheries and their orange t-shirts, engage with participants and share their first hand expert knowledge,” said Tim Sondalini, State Manager and Hackathon organiser.

Tim is a consultant at Deloitte, and volunteered his time for the event this weekend along with a committee, and mentor list mde up of current and former government workers, policy makers and government agents, as well as local entrepreneurs and experienced hackathoners.

The winners from this weekend’s GovHack will be announced in the coming days, and prizes will be awarded for the following categories;

  • WA Entrepreneurial Prize
  • Sustainability Prize
  • WA Innovation prize
  • WA Community Prize
  • Sharks Solution Prize

“GovHack this year was the best it’s ever been - we had more participants and we even got Geraldton on board. Our teams were brilliants, the level of technical expertise was astounding and the collaboration between non-techies and techies was great to see,” State Manager Tim Sondalini continued.

“This was my first GovHack as Spacecubed’s Events Assistant, and I have to say, it was awesome to see how many new ideas were created; the inclusion of the shark data added great variety and fun to the whole weekend too,” Lainey York, Spacecubed’s Events Assistant said.

With such a diverse range of participants, GovHack WA not only welcomed record number of participants, but also welcomed its youngest ever participant too, at the age of 12. Stay tuned soon for news on your GovHack winners, 2016.

 

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