Developers and coders help the government at #GovHackSA#GovHackSA was held recently at the BandwidthBarn in Woodstock, Cape Town and was a free, day-long coding marathon for developers and coders to create new and novel solutions to problems supplied to by the Western Cape government (Department of Economic Development & Tourism, and Department of Education), City of Cape Town and Wesgro. The stimulus for the event was a need expressed by Alan Winde, MEC for Finance in the Western Cape government, and taken forward by the volunteer GovHackSA team. There were four challenges. Each participant could choose which challenge they wanted to work on and teams were formed organically. Some chose to jump right into coding while others brainstormed ideas. At 1pm, Justin Coetzee of GoMetro shared his experiences as a start-up in getting access to government work (PRASA/Metrorail), explained how government procurement processes worked and shared his journey. Then it was back to work for the teams. More than 40 enthusiastic community members supported the day. The challenges were set and the teams formed:
According to Cape IT Initiative's executive director, Jenny McKinnell: "The goal of GovHackSA is not to create a fully working application on one the day, but rather to make a positive start and, more importantly, to help the government see that the local Western Cape IT community can develop applications that help the government solve its problems using software. Ultimately, though, the goal is to begin to build a co-operative, collaborative relationship between the Cape IT community and local and regional government that will create the win-win of government getting software that helps solve their problems in meeting citizens' needs and the start-up community getting access to government data and access to the government as a customer." The Judging panel consisted of Andy Volk (Mxit) and Lelany Sommers (Blackberry), with input from Jenny McKinnell (CITI) (although she didn't vote). The team that won was "Fix my Red Tape". The winning group consisted of Tony Mwebaze, Peter Phillip and Timothy Mchabeleng. The runners-up were from "Events App" (that "eventthing") - Tim, Tracey, Philip and Jonathan. There was a draw for attendance sponsored by Blackberry. Three Blackberry Playbook tablets were won by Tracey Baving, Kholofelo Moyaba and Motse Lehata. Making a differenceThe winners won the opportunity to expand on their application with the government, be fast tracked into the Mxit Kick-start programme (if they develop their app on the Mxit platform), entry into Start-Up weekend (which happens at the BandwidthBarn from 17 to 19 November) and the possibility of collaborating with the government in making a difference as to how services are delivered to citizens. The #GovHackSA Hackathon provided a great environment for developers to compete amongst each other, understand the government's challenges, learn from one another, experiment with building on existing code and APIs, and see how fast they can develop applications, said Lianne du Toit, organisor of #GovHackSA. We are looking at hosting more #GovHackSA events, which give like-minded programmers, developers, designers and coders an opportunity to meet each other and learn about the challenges of the government and helping to solve them. If you would like to know more about #GovHackSa or get involved, mail az.oc.askcahvog@ofni. The next Hackathon will be run in the first quarter of 2013. |