A group of school-aged developers taking part in a hackathon during lockdown have created an impressive Covid locations of interest map – all over one weekend.
As part of this year’s trans-Tasman GovHack August 20-22, Whangarei developers Jasper Miller-Waugh, Nathan Hare and Jacob Read used Ministry of Health data posted on GitHub and created an interactive map called Toi (which stands for Times of Interest).
Toi allows users to easily search COVID-19 locations of interest between specified dates. The website has a large, easy to navigate map and a slider at the bottom of the webpage to slide through different dates and see what the locations of interest are.
Blimps appear on the map showcasing the locations of interest and users can filter a specific location by using the search box.
GovHack – the largest open data hackathon in the Southern Hemisphere – was fully digital and remote this year and had a theme of Health and Wellbeing. Competitors were tasked with exploring solutions for aged care, disability, mental health, vaccine rollout and emergency response.
During GovHack, participants in Australia and NZ join a pool of thousands taking publicly-available data and turning it into a digital tool – all within 48 hours.
Participants also had to create explanatory videos, publish their creations (usually Application Programming Interfaces) online, and report on how they used their data sets.
Locations of Interest data maps based on MOH data from GitHub were covered in theBit covered in a previous article.
Click on developer Jasper Miller-Waugh or https://toi.qrl.nz/map to check out the TOI map.
