The last GovHack event was very smooth for Mangesh’s award winning team “Jarvis” but it wasn’t always like that in past years.
The last GovHack event was very smooth for Mangesh’s award winning team “Jarvis” but it wasn’t always like that in past years.
This GovHack was his third year and the experience paid off.
The team
Mangesh’s Team was a team of four. Two were office mates and the other was a friend so they knew each other from the “get go”.
The team chose a state level challenge from the ACT that asked them to use public transport data to address pain points. In their analysis they found that in peak hours, busses are super loaded, but off peak they are not being used at all.
The solution
The solution they came up with was to create a dynamic pricing model that calculates a price based on distance, occupancy, and time of day. By using price signals, the system might encourage a passenger to defer their trip to get them out of the busy time.
The dynamic pricing information would feed into a passenger’s mobile app in real time so they could, for example, skip a bus and catch a cheaper fair just five minutes later.
The team were all engineers and the solution was built using React and Spring boot (a micro services layer) running on Amazon’s cloud.
The Competition Weekend
Friday was “overall ideation”, the team all agreed with the project and a system architecture was sketched out on the white board.
Saturday’s focus was on getting the proof of concept UI design out.
Sunday was fine tuning of the design, mockups, proof of concept and preparing for the recording of the video.
Advice for first timers
Tips for new GovHackers?
The first year Mangesh participated in GovHack he didn’t join the team until the Saturday night and, looking back, he was super confused about how it should work.
His friend rang and said “hey, there’s something cool, why don’t you come over?”.
That year the team couldn’t even finish the problem statement by the end of Sunday. “It was a bit of an experience”.
Mangesh’s advice is “Grouping on Friday and zeroing on the challenge is super critical to achieve good outcome on Saturday and Sunday. It’s also very important to have clear roles defined to work out the solution in 2 days. Building the mock-ups / Designs and Scripts for video presentations along the way just helps to not spend a lot of time on presenting the idea in 2:30 mins”.
The experience of doing a hackathon helps people in their work as they get to quickly look at a problem and prototype a possible solution in a short timeframe.
Story by Peter Marks
Thank you Mangesh Gopale for participating in our Success Stories feature!