Team Mentally Friendly unlock the power of open data at GovHack

What happens when you gather some of the most creative minds across the country and give them free reign to generate innovative tools using open government data? You get GovHack – an open data competition with the exciting potential to produce effective solutions to tackle social, economic and environmental challenges.

The Sharing and Enabling Environmental Data (SEED) portal joined forces with GovHack again this year to showcase some of New South Wales’ environmental data and to learn a thing or two about what opportunities open government data present to better society. After sifting through an abundance of entries for our SEED GovHack Challenges, we found some little gold nuggets within some of this years’ winning projects: GreenRoutes by Mentally Friendly and CoolWalk Sydney by Team 520.

We spoke to Thom Vincent – a member of the Mentally Friendly team who won our Three C’s of Innovation Challenge – to gain some insights from the weekend and see the inspiration behind their project ‘GreenRoutes’.

Thom is the Technical Director at the design and innovation studio Mentally Friendly. With the studio having over 15 years’ experience helping decision-makers build evidence to confidently launch products and services that make people’s lives better, Thom saw another opportunity in GovHack to challenge himself and collaborate with like-minded individuals to build a product that would benefit the community.

GovHack is founded on principles of collaboration – where from the action of putting many ideas and minds together, innovation can flourish. Thom and another colleague Alex formed the basis for participating in GovHack after looking for hackathon opportunities across Sydney. Their other colleagues Liam, Amanda and Tyson joined soon after. Together they formed a super team comprised of a product manager and three developers. Amanda organised the planning of the build and strategy, Liam worked on the design, and Alex and Tyson built the prototype. In the spirit of teamwork, they floated between roles and supported each other.

To selecting from the multitude of datasets, solving unexpected technological problems, and forming various prototypes, the team crossed the finish line, submitting their entry with half an hour to spare.

Spawn out of their curiosity and ideation was the application: ‘GreenRoutes’.

GreenRoutes

With temperatures rising in Sydney each year, GreenRoutes aims to prepare citizens for heatwaves, tackle the issue of congestion and improve the well-being of the community through providing an application that calculates the coolest route to travel across Greater Sydney. By combining tree canopy data and urban heat data from SEED with a navigation algorithm to plot walking routes, alongside cycleway and local wildlife data, the application visually illustrates an efficient route for citizens to reduce their exposure to heat but still get them to where they need to be. Watch their elevator pitch on the application here:

Top tips for GovHack participants

For those considering participating in GovHack in the future, Thom provided a few key tips.

1. Spend some time upfront as a team planning for the weekend. Use this time to define the story you want to tell and how you want to tell it. This means creating a strategy and finding a way to execute that strategy.
2. Talk to those around you. It’s always beneficial to bounce ideas off other teams. Don’t worry about other teams copying your ideas. And take advantage of the mentor sessions – go in ready to present your idea and with questions to ask.
3. Last of all, don’t forget to have fun! Take advantage of meeting.

Key learnings

If there’s one key lesson to gain from GovHack, it’s the boundless opportunities that open data presents. As Thom says, “The most important benefit of open government data is its ability to foster social innovation. Open data provides organisations and the government with new opportunities to collaborate – allowing them to work together on improving existing services or creating new ones … Organisations can use the data to design a service or build a product that could help a community – or the entire population of Australia.”

And with that, another year of GovHack is over. It’s amazing what can happen in the span of one weekend. Thom sums it up perfectly in saying:

We only had a weekend. But in that time, we were able to prototype a product using real data. Imagine what we could do with a few months.

Mentally Friendly taking home the prize for the 'Three C's of Innovation' challenge. 

Read more about the  Mentally Friendly Team and their GovHack entry ‘GreenRoutes’ here.