The seductive lure of govhack enticed me yet again with its promise of deep crust pizza, tepid black coffee, and room ripened with that bouquet, that whiff of highly intelligent people crammed into a small space without that somewhat staple requisite – fresh air. How could that be missed??? Goodbye children, goodbye wife, hello to my annual pilgrimage, to my weekend sojourn, to my second life.

Govhack 2018 has come and gone. I wanted to share my thought process before, during and after this terrific national open government data challenge. Perhaps it’s slightly cathartic or perhaps it’ll provide some insight to others when they think of entering a hackathon. Or perhaps this ode to Vin is me at my narcissistic self best 🙂

A few weeks out and a few questions to ponder and reflect and eventually answer. Starting early gives you that ultimate luxury and enables you to emmerse yourself in the pleasure of procrastination. It is the ultimate maximiser of good ideas, as your half baked ideas slowly germinate and grow into something truly wonderful in the dark recesses of your brain.

1. What problem to look at?
2. What interesting technology to explore?
3. Can I assemble a team in time?

What problem to look at?

Getting teams together to focus on social impact themes is always of interest to me. In this hackathon as its govhack and environmental datasets - SEED - are available - I think it would be great to look at climate change... a big juicy, meaningful space to sink our teeth into!

Climate change... there's a lot of data sets and especially smart people looking at this... what on earth could we add?

Well, one thing could be the lack of engagement around climate change locally and nationally. We're seeing politicians failing to put in place meaningful policies as they fall over themselves to support their donors and supporters. Unfortunately, today’s answer by our politicians is to go to all the trouble of wearing a cap...

Recently the IPCC report was published and we saw the governments response - certainly we should be taking it a lot more seriously than we are. The press is talking more more about climate change effects. However, how many people are actually listening?

As climate change is an example of a wicked problem, a complex problem with many interdependent factors, perhaps people think its too big to do anything meaningful. Maybe many people don't believe in it, think its too far away to have any impact, or are simply carrying on with their lives. So perhaps, one thread could be is how do we get people to recognise this issue, understand more about it, get involved and contribute?

I read a great book once called Positioning. It’s main message was that people are so inundated by information that the filter everything out. That you only have time to position something and if they like it... then they will lift their filters and you will get their attention and time to say what you really want to say. So maybe the first question to address is how do we hook someone into the climate change discussion?

I think many people think about the effects of climate change and think it would have an impact in their lifetime. So its not something worth worrying about. So how can we look at climate science in terms that are meaningful today? Are there practical scenarios we can present that would help people make better decisions today?

If we look at topics like seal level rising - thats really interesting. In Australia so much of our population lives near our coastlines. So many tourist locations like our famous beaches may be at risk. However, a tool that allows us to see 60cm increase over 50 years doesn't sound like something too useful to most of us. But maybe thats the start. If we look at storm surges that could potentially be anything up to 5m .. maybe that risk of flooding makes that more interesting scenarios. So how do existing climate change models work? Do they take use a linear increase over time or do they use a greater multiplier?

What about inland? What if we look at areas like Parramatta, with an inland river and flood plains. Could we see more interesting scenarios of greater inundation? To do modelling properly would need to take into account local terrain and water flows.

Also I would guess that there's a tremendous amount of information that doesn't get into peoples hands when making decisions. So maybe that’s how we can empower people with more informed decision making.

What if you had the ability, similar to your investment portfolio selection for your superannuation, where you pick investments based on your risk appetite... maybe we could do something similar with modelling climate change for specific areas?

What if we could allow people to pick a profile based on their own risk appetite? But at the same time ensure that the models are grounded in some facts.

Technology

Mapbox provides a great alternative to google maps. It also has a Unity SDK so we could combine great map visualisations, open maps, augmented reality and 3D modelling together to provide great effects.

Time to get cracking on some tutorials and experiments to see how all this would work together. Shouldn’t be too difficult... right?

The team

A call out on Yammer and Slack at work and three of my colleagues from Deloitte Platform Engineering agreed to join forces for this event. Unfortunately, we’re all coders and I couldn’t find a volunteer who could focus on the video alone. That is going to be an extra task for me! Yikes!

The event

Friday night kickoff at govhack 2018. A hot room with way too many people and no windows! An enthusiastic crowd looking to change the world - one kB at a time.

An intense weekend of defining the problem, looking at the solution, storyboarding the solution, finding and wrangling elusive datasets, bouncing ideas off and getting assistance from the mentors, and getting a video together.

For me, a hackathon isn’t a hackathon unless you have some running code in a prototype so that was a key extra challenge our team set ourselves.

The standard was so high on videos last year, I wanted to see how we could perhaps try to lift our video entry. While researching climate change videos I was particularly taken by on called 3 minutes, set to rap music. Pretty amazing video. Crazily I thought - yeah let's do one!

On the train journey down to govhack I sketched out my first version of my climate change poem and then tweaked it during the weekend. Then I got up early... really early on Sunday morning, recorded and edited it using Adobe Audition.

Why is it always easier to add than take away when editing. I wasn't completely happy with the poem or the recording... I spoke pretty fast and its a little incomprehensible... as I'm still trying to get to grips with the product. Ah well - its a hackathon... so it'll just have to do!

I left getting excerpts from the AR app and the Unity app far too late in the day! Completing the coding, getting photos, the videos, splicing in the sound, writing up the project and the data sets smashed the team and we submitted with one minute to go before closing. I think we could have timed that better!

Thanks to Jo And Jay for their great work over the weekend working with datasets, documenting the solution and picking up a lot of new tech over the weekend.

Alok did an amazing job documenting the project from an architecture perspective. His write up can be found here:

You can check out our climate change project on govhack's project site (Climatic is ours) and all the other competitor entries here:

Our 3 min video entry below. You can see how rushed it was with the typos in the titles.

It was a pretty intense end of the day and after a couple of group photos so of course we went to the pub to... er.. debrief.

Post the event I've continued improving the climate change app, learning how to use Unity, Mapbox and other tools as I go. I guess that's part on the wonder of hackathons... being inspired enough to continue with the project with the small amount you can eek out on weekends or in the early hours of the workday.

The following example of one of the tweaks, is creating a Mapbox style based on iconic colours from the Australian outback. If you look carefully, you can see a building in yellow, which is a building I generated for Pararamatta's upcoming Powerhouse Museum project - Museum of Science and Art. About time we had more museums out west. Though I can’t see why on earth they have to close the existing one!