Open Data, Open Government and Civic Tech are super interesting to me, and I’ve had my eye on the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s GovHack event for a few years now. GovHack is a competitive hackathon run across Australia and New Zealand, using open data published by all levels of government. This year everything lined up in terms of my location and availability, and I decided to get involved. Being a hackathon n00b and knowing very little, I decided not to compete, and instead signed up to volunteer at the Melbourne event. Volunteering at the hackathon turned out to be a brilliant idea (well done, past Carly!).