So this year I decided to participate in GovHack as a "hacker" (I used the quotes as my coding skills are not that great), rather than just a data mentor.
Previously, I had enjoy attending the hacks, and as a mentor always tried to get the teams interested in biodiversity information. But this year, as I am no longer working at a museum, thought it was a good chance to try and get my hands dirty with data... Well, kind of dirty.
For those that do not know what GovHack is, it is a weekend long hackfest, where teams compete for prizes by re-using government datasets in new and interesting ways.
I decided to use this as a personal challenge. It's been a long time since I've done anything apart from Drupal and CollectiveAccess (and maybe a little bit of AngularJS), so wanted to work with new datasets, new languages, and most importantly, make something achievable within a few hours (am getting too old for 41 hours continuous hacking).
So I made Brisvegas Estate with the State Library of Queensland's digitised maps. Here's me introducing it:
And here's the actual map product:
Legend
< 1880 = blue
1880-1890 = green
1890-1900 = orange
> 1900 = red
undated = purple
So nothing fancy, nothing special, and nothing complicated. But, I made it... With plenty of time to spare. And it's still interesting.
If you want to know more, do check out the BrisVegas Estate project page.
But I do recommend attending GovHack next year. Is a great weekend and fantastic chance to meet with people interested in hacks, mash-ups and visualisations that increase value from government data.