What Data Do I Use?

Using Open Data

You will find the list of Official data available for the GovHack competition in the Hackerspace resources. You must use at least one Official dataset to be eligible for prizes. Official Data includes individual datasets featured and all data discoverable on official Government data portals that are published on the Official Dataset list.

You will need to Record the URL of the all datasets you have used on your Hackerspace project page. Remember judges love to see their data reused 🙂

For each prize category you enter, please check the eligibility requirements to see if any specific data needs to be reused to meet judges criteria. To maximise your chances to win International, National and Region (State/Territory) awards we recommend you mash up National and Region official data.  We limit the number of challenges you can nominate for the International, National, and Regional competitions to 5 between the two.

Some datasets listed on data portals may have additional resources available with further information on how to use the data or other supporting material. You are encouraged to download and use these resources.

Several competition goals require entries must use at least one of the datasets provided for this contest, but you are free to use data from the official GovHack list or other datasets as long as their licensing terms permit usage for this purpose. You may also use any publicly accessible web services as long as it does not incur a financial cost to use (private and subscription APIs are prohibited due to licensing issues and barrier to entry).

You can not use data you are the authority or a subject matter of… That’s not in the spirit of the competition.