Meet the data owners: VicRoads

What would you do if you had access to all of VicRoads' road and traffic data?

Government agencies have been making progress releasing data, but it's slow going. They don't know which data is the most interesting to developers, or what amazing things could be done by linking up the right datasets. This is your opportunity to talk directly to the people who can make it happen.

As a collaboration between the Australian Computer Society and the Open Knowledge Foundation, we have asked VicRoads and DataVic staff to join us for an evening that will be a mix of free-form brainstorming over drinks and butcher's paper, structured discussion and a bit of "reporting back". By the end of the night, we want to identify two things:

• what are the most sought after datasets?

• what could we do with them if they were released?

This is a pilot event in what we hope will grow into a regular series of "meet the data owners". Data experts from VicRoads will be coming to hear from you, the developers, data wranglers and designers. You can ask for live traffic data, traffic volumes, or any kind of detailed statistics collected across our vast transportation network - or anything else you can imagine. In return, pitch your ideas for the kinds of cool things you could create, if only the data were made available. This will help VicRoads staff identify, assess and prioritise for release data sets held in its internal systems.

We also want to develop the best approach to an ongoing, structured dialogue between data owners and the developer community, including preparing for VicRoads' and other agencies' participation in developer events such as Govhack 2014.

Please get involved and help shape the next public release of government data!