Innovate and create: Kate's GovHack experience

When you hear the words 'government' and 'hack' in the same sentence, you could be forgiven for thinking there is questionable business afoot. But third year Computer Science student Kate Henderson assures us the recent GovHack weekend in Wellington was all above board. Here's what she has to say about her team's success at the competition...

“GovHack is an event run across Australia and New Zealand where participants use government data to build projects. We pitch ideas, form teams and create a product in just one weekend. The word 'hack' traditionally has negative connotations, but here it is used in the old-fashioned sense of the word, where you 'hack' something together to get it working.

GovHack was attended by ideas people, community members and business and marketing experts, as well as developers and designers. I was part of Team Working Title. It was great to work with a mix of people, including students from Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria. We worked well together because we knew each other from our university courses.

Our project was called “What's Next?”, a career tool for high school students. Because many of us are at university, we can remember trying to make important decisions about the future. We turned NCEA subjects into interest groups and our tool suggested career options. It also supplied average incomes for that career and the average student loan expected. The government data we used was supplied by NZQA, MBIE and the IRD.

It was great to see just what's possible over just one weekend. We managed to build a functional, interactive web page, as well as a three minute video demonstrating our proof of concept. Working on a project for three days and having it turn out well at the end is a great feeling of accomplishment.

There is no chance before GovHack that I would have been offered links to government to pitch a project. It was a great opportunity. A lot of the people involved are in the industry already, and you might be working for them in the future. It's cool to meet those people and see what different companies are doing.

We were stoked to be awarded 'Best Team' and we were also named as the Wellington nomination for the national award. I would encourage other students to go along to events like this, even if you have no idea what to expect. Hackathons are just too much fun to pass up!”