GovHack Best of Show Features Constellation Roamer
Last weekend, Canberra hosted a government data hack day where some 150 geeks made use of Australian federal and state data to create public mashups. The winners of the Best of Show award used Constellation Roamer as part of their LobbyClue application.
Team members @zephell, @frglps, @DorisSpiel, @mjec, and @maxious had only thirty-six hours to build the impressive app which features tag clouds, geographic maps, and a graph visualization. They took advantage of Roamer's quick setup and customization to display the relationships between lobbyists, organizations, and post codes.
I think the movement toward open government data is an important one and it's great to be able to contribute to it. Releasing government data is only one step—you have to make it accessible and digestible to the public before it's really useful and data visualization is a great way to do that.