Burb Wars!
What is the difference between Marion and Modbury?
Our hack will be a play-off between suburbs to give people a chance to objectively compare suburbs, using more than just the ABS data currently used on Real Estate websites. We aim to make it fun, with a chance to challenge your friends' suburbs on different areas including Road Safety, Income, Crime Stats, health and hospital services, and more!
Please watch our video, it does a great job of explaining: https://youtu.be/Al0YuhbsDE8
Also, we have a lot of doco on our github: https://github.com/pastcompute/unleashed2015
And a story at http://burbwars.weebly.com/
Bounty: Most useful Product or Service for the Public
BurbWars! provides an incredibly useful resource for end users. In particular, they are able to see various information about their locality free of the bias (intended or not) that likely pervades commercial apps that have a similar theme. It allows them to compare and contrast, and also importantly provides information such as how to contact their local council with feedback on services. Because BurbWars! is implemented using a web service that provides aggregated data, it is possible to make more 'serious' applications based on the same data.
The most fun use of data
BurbWars! is of course a game! And games are fun! But it is a serious game: it demonstrates how a web service can be used to aggregate government data from many disparate sources into a form easy for end user developers to provide that information to the public. Also, the game provides a fun way to learn about your area, especially if you are a new arrival.
Data to design - using data to improve city planning and design
Our application demonstrates how councils can combine their data with other sources, to both provide useful information to the public, such as locations of playgrounds, but also, compare their performance against other areas. For example, playground information from the Cities of Port Adelaide Enfield and Burnside are available for residents to see, and compare. More importantly, the game will inform players which council they live in or might be visiting or moving to, and provide contact information - this is useful, the game can prompt them to provide feedback about services that might be improved!
Data to decision
Because BurbWars provides a way for players to connect with their council, etc. to provide feed back for areas of improvement, it can form the bases of a useful tool!
SASS place – coworking space for women
Alison & Amanda are awesome and would greatly appreciate this prize!
Bounty: Taxation data bounty
Our application provides several pieces of information about the area the user cares about, in an easy to understand manner. For example, they can see at a glance how many people paid tax, have a HECS debt, and so on, in the area they live or might be visiting. This information is also of use to businesses wishing to service the area.
Bounty: Charity data bounty
Data provided by the ACNC charities register at http://data.gov.au/dataset/acnc-register allows a player exploring their suburbs to see what charities actually have an office nearby. This can be useful for example when deciding where to donate goods such as used furniture, or clothing, for example.
Bounty: Health and welfare bounty
Although AIHW data is not reported by postcode, state data such as health expenditure (http://data.gov.au/dataset/health-expenditure-in-australia) can be reported to the player as an additional guide to the health services in their region.
The Best Data Journalism Hack
Presenting important information in the format of an interactive game well suits the 21st century style of information presentation. The user is kept interested, educated and a story can be told. By use of the web service we make it possible to build or integrate with other forms of electronic media
South Australia the Knowledge State
International students play a key part in the fabric of our state. BurbWars provides them with a fun and simple way to discover SA as a destination and assist them in finding a suitable place to live whilst studying here
Safer Cities and Roads
BurbWars alerts people to the volume of road crashes in their area. It also tells the player the number of roads in their area! If they realise their suburb is a high crash risk, they may modify their driving! Importantly, applications can be developed that integrate this with other information and provide insights to decision makers.
Best Professional Team
Amanda is a learning technologist and iOS developer.
Alison professional accomplishments include developing device drivers for hearing aid software.
Andrew is a computer software engineer, by day working for a company based in Mawson Lakes, and in his spare time a contributor to various open source projects.
Daniel is a Oracle Database administrator by day at a small service provider in Adelaide.
Alison is a lecturer for TafeSA.
Data is beautiful
Our game BurbWars shows how data can be presented in visually attractive and engaging way yet educational
Helping Communities Connect
Our game will help people discover resources in their area. Results can be hyperlinked, and the web service easily extended to return detailed information - for example, when a suburb has '7' community resources, clicking the link can show the name and address of those ovals, parks, or jetties, for example.
Best Industry, Science or Research data mash up
We imported the data.sa industry data set https://data.sa.gov.au/data/dataset/south-australian-community-services-... to gather a list of community organisations.
The Best Digital Transformation Hack
We think a game like ours is a great way to show of a variety of educational or useful community data in an accessible way!
The Best Open Government Data Hack
We think a game like ours is a great way to encourage interaction with the community - the game can include a prompt for people to contact the local council or other services to ask for improvements or suggestions.
The Best Policy Insights Hack
We think the web service underpinning our app demonstrates how different and disparate data can be combined in insightful ways
Simplified Architecture Description
The system is comprised of three key components:
- Database - raw data has been imported from data.sa and data.gov.au, massaged and analysed into a form suitable for asking questions based on geographic location
- Web service layer - this is a critical component that takes questions from applications, queries the database and returns the answer.
- The web service is important as it allows any number of applications to use the data in any way they find useful, regardless of the platform (mobile, web, etc.) or software used for development (iOS, Android, PHP, python, javascript, HTML5, flash)
- Application - the Game BurbWars demonstrates the usefulness of the web service by providing a fun and educational experience and also illustrates that policymakers can use the data to elicit feedback from users in a frictionless manner.
- The game is developed in Flash due to the time constraints of Govhack Unleashed and can easily be converted to HTML5 if required.
Data Preparation Process
- Data aggregation : the team spent time looking at a multitude of sources, most of which were available in CSV, or Shape files, and had to import and coalesce this data into a SQL database. Along the way we used Google drive, you can see some of our working notes at https://docs.google.com/a/dns.id.au/document/d/1jZGfaH_A1eVcynoB4lUuY5QI...
- Data insight : a key component is posing of questions : 'Which of these two suburbs has more parks' (with the implication, which is more livable?) This question is also useful to planners: where do we need to build community infrastructure?
Software
Obviously Govhack Unleashed is only one weekend. So a good up front plan is important. At the same time, we dont have time to over-engineer and have to make trade offs that a proper software development build would not require.
The web service as implemented so far is documented at https://github.com/pastcompute/unleashed2015/blob/master/README.md
Future Extension
This is a key part of our story! The BurbWars experience demonstrates how a web service can be used to aggregate data from a large number of data sources and provide a simple API for third parties to access community data and provide useful tools to the South Australian community