BY Michelle Howie 20 October 2020
What do you get when you give 700 hackers, hustlers and hipsters across Australia and New Zealand, access to over 600 data sets from all levels of council, government and private sector, plus free tech tools and data portals? World-changing solutions! That’s what went down at GovHack 2020.
After being a participant myself for years (shoutout to Adelaide and Gold Coast Regional GovHacks), it was awesome this year to be a judge and mentor of the Australian National Virtual GovHack with the TelstraDev team. For me, GovHack represents the opportunities we get when we enable everyday citizens to have access to open data, and the tools to harness those insights. At TelstraDev, we're also about enabling people of all abilities, creating better lives by exposing our core network services via APIs.
TelstraDev GovHack 2020 challenge
For the first TelstraDev challenge, we asked 2020 GovHackers: How can our local leaders use mobile messaging to connect with citizens in a safe, reliable and effective way for emergency communications?
In a crisis, especially in natural disaster areas, one of the hardest things to manage is the co-ordination of citizens and volunteers. SMS and MMS, though older technology, are still some of the most effective ways of communicating, as they're more likely to be read and acted upon than email. For bulk communication and co-ordination, you need to have robust, automated services in place that can get the right message to the right people at the right time, integrated into platforms that make sense. That’s where APIs come in.
We had over a dozen submissions to this challenge, all integrating the Telstra Messaging API in various ways. Here are some of the finalists.
Finalists
iFAS (Instant Fire Alert System) by MERITS
iFAS was built to alert residents at different stages of fire, tackling lack of information in the community during a bushfire. The team proposed deploying an ad hoc sensor network into rural bushlands, which collects and analyses environmental data like smoke, heat, sound and animal movement. AI is then used to predict the severity and recommended action, with automated alerts enabled by seamlessly integrating the Telstra Messaging API. Team MERITS also thought of other ways to get the message out in the future, including smart fridge alerts!
Watchtower by Club Platypus
This solution proposed an operational management system with integrated Telstra messaging and CSIRO data analytics for a smarter, more connected modern emergency service. They addressed a gap in scalability for the massive bushfire events we're seeing in Australia lately, including “consistency of information across jurisdictions”. They used the Telstra Messaging API to mass automate SMS for SES staff dispatching and coordination. See their database models on GitHub.
Project Mantissa by Mantissa
To avoid the pain of getting volunteers to install a new app for workforce management, Mantissa created a working linux dashboard to send out SMS directly to field staff, which was easy to build with the Telstra Messaging API:
“It is actually quite surprising how much the Telstra [API] empowered us to make such a powerful solution that can work from a desktop on premise.”
Their serverless, on-prem solution built in cpp, cobol and python allows a central manager to import contact lists and send selective broadcasts to groups, re-broadcast incoming messages, and assign tasks to individual volunteers. Their repo is on GitHub.
FireCloud by FireTech
This early warning broadcast system for bushfire monitoring supplements existing satellite-based systems with IoT remote sensing devices, which integrates that data, and broadcasts emergency SMS alerts if the risk determined in the area exceeds a certain threshold. Their source code is available on GitHub if you’d like to try it out.
Team FireTech identified the bushfire prone areas with NSW’s BushFire Prone Land dataset and Victoria’s Designated Bushfire Prone Area dataset. Their wireless devices will be connected via LPWAN networks to allow longer battery life, ideal for rural deployments (hello Telstra NB-IoT!).
Solace by Swinburn Army
The COVID-19 crisis was at the top of everyone’s mind during GovHack 2020, as we all dialled in virtually from across the region. Swinburn Army addressed the impact of the pandemic’s effects on our elderly population, namely health and wellbeing. Solace is their mobile app to connect elderly Australians to a caregiver, their families, and suggest relevant events in the community. Integrating open data of active COVID cases and hospitals nearby was a nice touch. To me it was like Bumble BFF, FitBit, Zoom, Google Maps, COVIDSafe and a telehealth app all in one! The Telstra Messaging API was utilised for emergency situations triggered by events in the app that sent our broadcast texts to pre-defined emergency contacts, pre-populating the message with contextual information about their location.
Learn more
All of this year's GovHack submissions, and the videos of our finalists are available on GovHack Hackerspace: 2020.hackerspace.govhack.org
Check back after Oct 20 to see the winners: https://govhack.org/2020-winners/
Learn more about communication APIs in the TelstraDev GovHack conference workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU4cA5JnQG8
Try out the Telstra Messaging API yourself with this quick tutorial: https://dev.telstra.com/content/get-started-telstradev-messaging-api
In the next blog in our GovHack 2020 series, we present the finalists in our second challenge: IoT sustainability
