We are a team of culturally diverse female public servants (and two token males). In the last 46 hours we developed Pick-A-Park!
Find the parks nearest to you with the activities that you - or your kids - want to do. That's the idea behind Pick-A-Park, a web app (optimised for iPhone 5) where Victorians can choose the custom icon of the elements they want in a park and be directed to their ultimate free-time/play-time/party-time public destination. Or maybe just the nearest public toilet.
We built Pick-A-Park because there is no app that brings together so much invaluable data about state and national parks and local playgrounds and serves it up in a way that is entirely focused on user needs. We mashed two park data sets with six additional data sets from Data Vic and City of Melbourne to locate all the parks and identify: disability access, public toilets, lighting, no smoking areas, footpaths, exercise equipment, drinking fountains, barbecues and playground features (slides, see saws, swings, etc).
Recommendations for future development (we only had 46 hours after all):
- Add in additional data sets: PTV travel information, live BOM weather data, Aboriginal land ownership, trees of significance, free wifi spots, event booking data, information on local wildlife and crime statistics (to indicate safest parks!).
- Create useful groups to filter by, eg: family, friends, fitness, etc.
- Add community integration to crowd source additional information about phat can link up to a arks and extend the database of info.
- Add more sophisticated reporting with the ability to crowd source issues and link this with community members, eg. local accredited tradespeople who can quickly fix a broken swing.
- Exploring what Victoria has to offer: Pick-A-Park is mobile compatible (iPhone5) and uses eight Victorian government data sets with the scope to use many more (see our recommendations). We have highlighted Victoria's parks making it fun and simple for a whole range of users (families, couples, singles, friends, everyone!) to find a park that best meets their needs, increasing visibility for tourists and the local community alike. Pick-A-Park is the easy way to explore Victoria!
- Best use of data to improve Victorian local government services (or access to services): Pick-A-Park makes it easy and fun for the local community to engage with their parks, filtering by specific facilities they want on that day, enhancing use of parks. Future recommendations include the ability to crowd source issues and link this with community members, eg. local accredited tradespeople who can quickly fix a broken swing, saving councils time and money and building community connection.