Hi Silicon Beacher's!

I just wanted to let you know about an exciting hackathon that's coming up in a few weeks:

What is GovHack?

GovHack is coming to the Gold Coast this year commencing on Friday evening 31 May and culminating on Sunday evening 2 June 2013 and is being held at the Robina Community Centre located at 196 Robina Town Centre Drive, Robina.

Governments collect and publish enormous amounts of data, but have limited resources to get it into the hands of their citizens in engaging ways. GovHack is an event to draw together people from government, industry, academia and of course the IT and software development industry along with the general public to mashup, reuse, and remix government data. GovHack is about finding new ways to do great things and encouraging open government and open data.

GovHack runs over 48 hours starting with drinks, networking and the competition announcements on the night of Friday 31 May. On Saturday teams must form and register by midday. Teams then work through the weekend and then on Sunday afternoon each team has 5 minutes to present their prototype to everyone, including the judges. Over the course of the event technical workshops will be run to help teams with their project and mentors from a range of areas will be on hand to help out.

GovHack is open to everyone and anyone, from data vis, designers and UX'ers through to web developers and hard core application developers.

GovHack is about having fun and learning, regardless of peoples level of expertise. From first year university students through to hardened developers, everyone who gets involved will come away from the weekend with something new, whether it be code, content, an idea or new contacts and friends.

GovHack is a FREE event and there will be copious amounts of power, WiFi, food and caffeine on hand.

Local PRIZE POOL of over $15,000 including cash prizes!

For information about GOvHack and to register to attend, please visit http://www.govhack.org/locations/gold-coast/