The Northern Territory Government has won a huge accolade at the prestigious GovHack 2022 International Red-Carpet Awards in Melbourne.
The Territory Government took home ‘Best Government Participation: State/Territory Government Award’ as part of the festival of ideas, GovHack 2022.
Rifat Mahmud, NT Region Lead at GovHack, said he felt humbled and privileged to accept the award on the Government’s behalf. “Congratulations to the Northern Territory Government. Also, a very special thanks to the team at Business Innovation for all their support over the year as well,” he said.
The award comes at the end of an exciting year where teams of ground-breaking thinkers and digital creators took part in GovHack, an annual open government data competition held across Australia and New Zealand.
As part of GovHack NT 2022 more than 60 teams of students and graduates accessed more than 750 publically available Northern Territory Government data sets to create a prototype or project to solve real world issues sustainably.
Several challenges, including ‘Ensuring the safety of our staff’, ‘How to beat Gamba Grass’, ‘Displacing Diesel’ and ‘Youth participation in STEM activities in the Northern Territory’, were provided by the Northern Territory Government, Charles Darwin University, Inspired NT and New Future IT.
Sponsored by Charles Darwin University, Team 2230 won the Ensuring the safety of our staff challenge with their solution which looked at digitising the information of organisations so staff could only use authorised and well-maintained vehicles, equipment or machines.
Their proposal would include fulfilling the training requirements for all employees while recording their training histories. In addition, the project would keep a log report and a maintenance history for all the vehicles, equipment and types of machinery used within an organisation.
The GovHack NT 2022 event supported initiatives in the Territory Government’s Territory Business Innovation Strategy 2.0, launched in March this year. One of the strategy’s priorities is activating the innovation ecosystem to maximise opportunities for existing members, and to attract new members to generate value and diversify the economy.
“GovHack NT 2022 was a great success,” said Director of Business Innovation Martin Redhead. “Not only were there so many incredible ideas, GovHack was a prime example of establishing local innovation clusters to foster collaboration between Territory enterprises and research and development to supply innovative solution to Territory challenges.”
At the GovHack NT 2022 awards night at Charles Darwin University in October, students and graduates heard from inspirational guest speakers including Gus Balbontin, former Executive Director and Chief Technology Officer of Loney Planet investor, and innovation guru, and Liandra Gaykamangu, founder and creative director of fashion label, Liandra Swim.
Other GovHack NT 2022 winners included team Kiddos for the ‘Youth participation in STEM activities in the Northern Territory’ challenge, NT Tech by Sugarcity.io for the ‘Displacing Diesel’ challenge with Arwa_Team 1904 receiving an honourable mention. Another GovHack winner GreenNT will take part in the Business Innovation Program for their successful Gamba Grass Management project.
Deakin O-Day, from Burwood, Deakin, won the ‘Meeting short-term health needs outside of a hospital’ challenge with Darwin’s team Eucalyptus as runner-up with their project Kartukuni. Eucalyptus also won the ‘Best of the NT’ challenge, along with Team 2230, while TelStars, from Melbourne, won the ‘Cultural diversity in the workplace’ challenge.
To find out GovHack 2022.