Cross-posted at Code for Australia.
Last week, Code for Australia launched its first fellowship program, a four-month project where a civic-minded developer will try a new approach to helping government solve problems with their data. For the next few months, I’ll be the Data Guru in Residence, blogging mostly to http://melbdataguru.tumblr.com. The program got a brief mention in The Age.My goals are to find interesting and useful datasets, help make them public, and do fun stuff with them. It’s a kind of test run for the Code for Australia hacker in residence program currently being developed. Since I work for the University of Melbourne, I’ll be targeting datasets that are useful for researchers, and using VicNode to store data wherever it’s needed.
To start with, I’m spending some time with the CityLab team at City of Melbourne. They’re very progressive on the open data front, and their Open Data Platform has some really high quality datasets, like the 70,000-tree Urban Forest or the Development Activity Monitor which contains detailed information on property developments.
“Living, Breathing Melbourne”, our GovHack Project, would be so much better with live data feeds.
Some of the immediate datasets on the radar are finding live feeds from the city’s pedestrian sensors and bike share stations. I’d love to incorporate these into the successful Govhack project, Living Breathing Melbourne, built with Yuri Feldman and Andrew Chin. There’s also lots of interesting data from the Census of Land Use and Employment with immense detail on how floorspace is divided up between residential, retail, commercial and so on. There areMahlstedt fire plans, LIDAR data, and a really detailed, textured 3D model of the CBD. And of course other data that’s already public, but whose full potential hasn’t yet been realised.
If you’re from a government body (Federal, State, Council, or agency), based in or around Melbourne and you could use the services of a Data Guru, please get in touch!
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