Michael Ferguson: Tasmanians Join The Hack

The Liberal Government is proud to support this year’s GovHack event, aimed at improving government services and transparency.

GovHack is a national competition running from July 11 to July 13 where participants are given datasets and have to create new and improved ways for users to understand the information.

The Liberal Government is providing a number of datasets for competitors to work on, including Metro timetables, crash statistics and school bus routes as well as a small financial grant.

From this, participants could develop apps which, for example, tell motorists what their crash risk is at certain times of day or whether a bushfire is likely to affect a school bus route. For bus passengers, this data could be used to tell travellers when the next available bus will be passing a certain stop.

I am extremely excited to see what kind of applications competitors come up with using the Tasmanian Government data and what it could mean for our State.

The Liberal Government is committed to supporting the Information and Communication Technology sector as a way of increasing Tasmania’s economic wealth, productivity and business competitiveness.

Teaming up with innovative programs such as GovHack will help support our vision and we are pleased to provide local data to help competitors tackle issues which are close to home.

Long-awaited datasets provided by the Government for the first time include;

• Hobart Metro Routes & Timetables
• Burnie Metro Routes & Timetable
• Launceston Metro Routes & Timetables
• Tasmanian School Bus Routes
• Tasmanian Crash Data
• Generic medicine names and the quantity dispensed by the Royal Hobart Hospital Pharmacy Department in the past financial year
• Interstate patient trips which received financial assistance from the Tasmanian Patient Travel Assistance Scheme (PTAS).
Michael Ferguson, Minister for Information Technology and Innovation