Canberra Business Ninja

http://canberrabusiness.ninja

Govhack 2018 Project Page

Introduction

Scaling your SMB (Small and Medium-sized Businesses) is hard work. It's difficult to ascertain if a particular business district or the local corner shops is the best place to move to or best place to set up a new store. Understanding your customer where your customers are is one thing, understanding your business needs is another.

Better Enable Councils to Develop Local Economies

CanberraBusiness.Ninja offers local councils and governments the ability to analyse the demographics, geography, infrastructure and other economic data of areas within their jurisdiction by comparing the nature of businesses that already exist within their area of interest to similar businesses that sustainably operate in suburbs with a similar nature.

In doing this, segments of the economy, industries, or specific businesses that are lacking within a local council's area of interst are immediately flagged. For example, if a suburb of interest contains 2 bakeries per 1000 people, but a similar suburb sustains 5 bakeries per 1000 people, then the fact that the density of bakeries within the area of interest is flagged. This allows governments to understand the deficiencies within their local economy from which they can plan zoning, infrastructure, and education/training to develop their local economy and create employment.

However, just because a government knowns which businesses are under-represented with an area, it is very difficult for them to dictate to entrepreneurs what businesses they should open and where those businesses should be located.

CanberraBusiness.Ninja addresses this problem by recommending to entrepreneurs and small business owners which places are optimal to locate their businesses; the under-represented businesses within a council area are the same areas that we recommend entrepreneurs to open businesses.

The way that our web application recommends locations to entrepreneurs is based on demographic and economic data to find where their business achieves the best market fit and least competition based on their data input into our application. The data a small business owner inputs relates to the nature of their target customers from which our application analyses the demographics of towns and suburbs to find the best fit.

Installation

Software pre-requisites are nodejs and npm. Clone and run the project

On Ubuntu 16.04 run:

$ sudo apt-get install nodejs npm
$ git clone https://github.com/svict4/whereshouldilive.git
$ npm install (or yarn install)
$ npm start (or yarn start)

Acknowledgments/Copyleft

In the "Spirit of Govhack" and being a 1337 h4x0r, this project was lovingly ripped off/forked from the Govhack project: Where Should I Live.

'Where Should I Live' was developed at the 2017 Australian GovHack at the ACT event. Visit their official hackerspace for further information and the datasets used.

We congratulate them for winning a Govhack award in 2017 🎉 There is no greater honor than imitation 😉

Data Sets and Methodology

We take a normalised average of age, income and public art displays against each suburb in Canebrra. This is done by taking the min and max then noramlise to output a score between 0 and 1 that determins the colouring for each suburb.

Please see the Govhack Project page for more information.