Do the Weekend

There’s a radio commercial playing at the moment that starts, ‘this weekend you can do the mountain, do the hockey or do the data’; which is exactly what you can do this weekend in Rockhampton. There’s Challenge the Mountain, the Oceania Cup over 5 days starting today and GovHack running all weekend. As well as that, there’s the Emu Park Fishing Classic, local tennis and football finals plus a book signing on Sunday. In fact, this week Rockhampton will host 14 Olympic Gold medallists, the world’s current best hockey team (as well as 3 other teams ranked in the top 8 in the world), 2 former international hockey player of the year winners, a three time Golden Boot winner and arguably the world’s greatest female cyclist. Pretty impressive, yet here is this faint call from the non-sporting world to Do the Data. How can it hope to get awareness amongst this smorgasbord of sporting greatness? Yet for Rockhampton’s future the call to do the data is as important as hosting an Olympic Games qualifier. You hear it all the time that we must adapt, relearn, upskill, innovate, become smarter to be able to get the better paying jobs, to make it attractive for our youth to stay, to attract people to relocate here, to make our economy more diverse and stronger. Hosting events like GovHack is part of this progression. Like the international hockey teams, GovHack participants will work together to achieve their objective, they’ll be under the pump for most of the weekend, mentally challenged and show signs of fatigue towards the end of it. Winners will be cheered, and will have the chance to go on to bigger more prestigious contests; but they’ll be lucky to receive any recognition in the mainstream media. Especially on a weekend with so much happening. Yet, maybe like many of the participants in Challenge the Mountain its not about winning, gaining public recognition, its about taking something on, pushing yourself, seeing how you respond, gaining support from people who only minutes before were strangers and then at the end feeling a rush of satisfaction for doing it. To the local media, in this weekend’s frenzy of covering all that is happening, don’t forget the GovHack participants at the Smart Hub, report on their innovative ways of repurposing government data. After all it will have a positive impact on Rockhampton’s future, maybe directly from the ideas developed that lead to commercial and/or social benefits for this community and others, but definitely indirectly, as these champions of data maintains Rockhampton’s proud record in GovHack, with multiple year national winners, and demonstrating to the nation that Rockhampton has an innovative, entrepreneurial spirit that in a weekend of so much sport is willing to do the data instead.  It’s this spirit that will attract like people to our region. People who help Rockhampton become Australia’s first smart regional centre and receive the recognition and government funding to help achieve this.