Data & Tech Mentors
During the GovHack weekend, we need brilliant and passionate people from government agencies, commercial companies, and all other walks of life who can help our participants at the hackathon. If you are an expert in accessing or interpreting datasets; designing data models; building working software or developing and presenting ideas that use data to solve policy problems – please get in touch with us!
Mentors provide what is essentially online, real time, technical and data/metadata help. They generally come from Sponsoring organisations. Primarily our mentors are data, technology or idea experts that come from sponsoring government agencies or sponsors providing technology platforms. Mentors can also be data, technology or idea experts who are not representatives of those groups, but are still keen to contribute to GovHack, however their involvement will be limited, with first preference given to sponsor provided mentors.
If you are interested in being in being a Mentor, please register your interest. We will attempt to match you with the role that is the best fit for your skills, location and timeslots, and we will be in touch soon to advise on where you may be best suited to help.
Data Mentors
As a Data Mentor, you can help make the GovHack competition a success through engaging with participants to promote the re-use and interpretation of your data. Data Mentors can help to incubate ideas, solve problems and answer questions.
This is a competition and it is meant to be fun, so Data Mentoring is very informal.
Competitors may ask you questions about your data so they can create the best new idea and pick your brain so they can understand and interpret your data better.
Good data mentors will:
- Know your datasets and where they are hosted e.g data.gov or data.sa
- Be prepared to provide a two minute briefing on your data if asked about your data
- Understand the limitations or complexity of re-using the data
- Let competitors know if there are metadata, protocols or documentation that can help them understand the data.
Really good Data Mentors will think of challenges or problems with data to help incubate ideas. Remember the best concepts mash up data so maybe suggest some complimentary data you would use if creating something cool.
In the past we have found the best outcomes are when Data Mentors (either National or Local) attend their local event on the opening night &/or Saturday morning. This is when ideas are forming and data is being mashed.
Tech Mentors
Ever been under a ton of stress or lack of sleep and just cant seem to get that thingybob working? Welcome to the world of a GovHacker after 38 hours of coding and video creating!
If you can help with technical advice for everything from data analytics tools, applications for hacking, Spatial stuff, Coding, scribing, screencasting, Storyboards, Youtube, video stuff, graphics or anything please join the volunteers as a Tech mentor.
GovHack Mentor Liaisons
GovHack will provide Mentor Liaisons on hand to help teams connect with you as data or tech mentor. During the event, we’ll be monitoring the GovHack Slack community for questions for mentors.