How do I “govhack”? - a guide for newbies

Recently the team I am putting together for GovHack 2017 had a catch up. A few of our team have never been to GovHack. When the team members who had been to GovHack before tried to explain what GovHack was and how it differed to a traditional hackathon we quickly found that it was hard to explain exactly how GovHack works. GovHack is very broad in what can be delivered and this is both the best and hardest thing about going to it. I have always seen GovHack as a scope cutting exercise more than a problem solving one. You could even say that cutting scope is the problem you go to GovHack to solve.

The best way to explain GovHack is to actually go to GovHack. However that doesn’t help someone who wants to get an idea of what they might expect and do some basic prep in order to get the most out of the weekend.

Whilst you can’t start building something before the weekend you can do some simple things to make sure you are making the most of your time. I know from my experience that I spent quite a few hours less on non-GovHack-ing tasks at my 2nd GovHack as compared to my 1st. All that was down to simply knowing what to expect the second time around.

I put together a guide for the members of my team who were new to GovHack. This is not the “definitive guide” to GovHack. What it is is my best attempt at getting a GovHack newbie as close to the GovHack experience in the shortest time possible. Hope it helps you as it did my team.

How to go to GovHack without going to GovHack

You could spend days sifting through datasets, reading resources and watching GovHack videos and still not really understand what GovHack is and what you do there.

Nothing will ever be as effective at explaining what GovHack is like than actually attending the event.

However there is a little exercise that you can do to walk through a GovHack project from start to finish. It goes like this:

• Prizes > Datasets > Idea > Final Project.

Not all projects will have taken this exact journey. Case in point: At the last two GovHacks my teams have worked the process in two different orders:

• 2015: Idea > Prizes > Datasets > Final Project
• 2016: Datasets > Idea > Final Project > Prizes

There’s no “right” way to approach GovHack, but there are easier ways to start to understand the beast that you are dealing with. I’ve laid out a simple step-by-step process of breaking apart a GovHack project. The idea is to be able to move through the process fairly quickly so you can do it for many projects.

Go to the 2016 prizes page. Pick a prize.

Go to the prize page. Here you’ll see what the criteria for the prize was and all the projects that nominated for that prize.

Before you pick a project find the prize in the state or national award winners lists. Find the project that won and look at this team’s project page. Here you’ll see a number of things:

• Summary of the project
• A link (if applicable) to a working demo of the project
• Link to video entry of the project. The video is what the majority of the judging will be on. But don’t be fooled into thinking the quality matters at all: It’s all about the content.
• Any assets that the team used in making the project. This is really helpful to dispel any thoughts you might have that GovHack projects are complex products. Whilst there have been a few truly mammoth pieces of work done over a GovHack weekend; they remain firmly the exception rather than the rule. Instead projects, including the winners, are frequently clever PoCs (proof of concepts) that are able to get the intent and basic functionality across to someone quickly.
• All the prizes a project was nominated for. Teams often nominate for a lot of prizes
• The datasets that the team used in their project

Look at each of these elements to get an idea of how the team used the datasets to address the criteria and (most importantly) the intended purpose of the prize

Now go back to the prize page and find a project that didn’t win any prizes. Have a look at how they did their project. You’ll find that there are heaps of great GovHack projects that didn’t win any prizes. It’s important not to just look at the winning projects as that may lead to you to believe that:

• GovHack is about winning prizes: It’s not; it’s about creating great projects that you enjoy making and are proud of.
• There is some sort of secret formula to winning at GovHack: There isn’t. There’s some really great projects each year that win nothing.

Repeat for a number of prizes. You’ll soon get a good feel for what you can make over the weekend and what you’ll need to make it.