Few weeks ago, two friends and I participated in a contest called Mashup Australia organized by The Government 2.0 Taskforce with the aim to help them ‘show why open access to Australian government information is good for our economy and society’.
Our application was called Suburb Matchmaker and won the Best Student Entry prize. How was Suburb matchmaker born? Our team was only formed at the Open Australia Hackfest at Google where people with different skills developed mashups using data from the government for the benefit of citizens. Although we all had a number of ideas, we had a common interest in the data related to crime statistics from http://data.australia.gov.au/.
We believe that information is only as powerful as the application that is given to it. We decided to use government data to help citizens find the best suburb for them by providing their preferences in a number of factors (more families with children, with no children, more single people, etc). At that point we had one week to finish the mashup. We also used crime data to provide information about the crime classification and incidents in each area of NSW.
One of the benefits of Suburbmatchmaker is that not only can people find the area of their dreams to live based on the suggestions from the application; but also, those who are not looking for a new suburb to live in can find out more information about their area and to connect with it. Such information and trends are displayed in a text mode and in more detail with a dashboard. Also, you can see the key findings of Crime victimization in Australia, based on results of a survey conducted by the Australian Institute of Criminology in 2004.
Another benefit of this mashup is that it allows citizens to interact with the information by providing a space to promote events and post pictures of their area. This part of this application could be of particular interest for isolated communities interested in attracting more visitors and people to settle in the community.
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