Over the weekend, the Secret Lab team participated in GovHack 2013. Together with our friends and colleagues we formed a team and hacked a project together, using government data, over the 48 hour event.

The GovHack team included Secret Lab’s Jon and Paris, as well as frequent collaborators and friends Tim “McJones” Nugent, Nic “Winton” Wittison, Josh Deprez, Matthew D’Orazio, and Rex Smeal, as well our friends Frank Sainsbury, Sebastian Cook, and Eloise “Ducky” Macdonald-Meyer. Together, the team built a digital card game called Marvellous Ultimate Appliance, based around Energy Australia’s appliance efficiency and power consumption data.

The game was designed to help raise awareness of the energy usage and efficiencies of common household appliances. We had an absolute blast making it, and can’t wait for next year’s GovHack!

You can learn more about our 2-day game, Marvellous Ultimate Appliance, at http://admiraldolphin.github.io. The game was built in Unity, and runs on the web, Mac, Windows, and Linux. We plan to expand on it, with the team, in the near future. Thank you to the Hobart venue, The Typewriter Factory, and the organisers in Hobart, particularly Richard Tubb and Casey Farrell. The food was brilliant, the venue was brilliant, and the constant coffee was exceptional!

Special congratulations to our team member, Frank Sainsbury, who won the Spirit of GovHack award for Tasmania. Likewise, thank you to Pia Waugh for organising the event nationally.

You can watch our team's video below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLppE0mx5DE&w=500] You can view all of our photos from GovHack 2013 in Tasmania on Flickr. Don't forget to check out our project, as well as all the other brilliant projects on the GovHack Hackerspace.