When Alvaro Maz started his career as an urban planner he had no idea that it would one day lead him to become an entrepreneur championing social change through technology.

‘My thing is cities. I love cities,’ he says, his eyes alive with passion, as he sits drinking tea in the comfortable surrounds of Melbourne’s Henley Club, where Melbourne street chic merges seamlessly with understated opulence. The club is situated in quaint Rankin’s lane, one of Melbourne’s many laneways that give the city much of its character.

His love of cities comes as no surprise, but what is more intriguing is how he ended up co-founding social enterprise Code for Australia.

‘I started in urban planning and then found the opportunity to, I guess, do the same as I was doing in urban planning but using technology,’ he says when prompted to elaborate on his transition to entrepreneurialism. ‘We bring innovation to the government through technology, collaboration and transparency.’ Code for Australia is one of a growing body of organisations across the world looking to open the wealth of data collected by governments for use by citizens and industry.

Opening datasets allows governments to be more accountable and transparent whilst also providing a valuable resource industry can use to make apps for use by citizens.

Two that stand out are using data on footpath to show routes accessible by wheelchair and an app currently in production, Re-Route It, that allows users to calculate environmental, fiscal and time costs associated with different modes of transport.

‘Unfortunately governments don’t use data efficiently, however, they collect ridiculous amounts of data – especially local councils and what we are trying to do is get them to release those data sets but also to start using them more efficiently,’ he explains. Governments gather data on everything from trees, to parking meters to train times and a whole host of things in between.

Though legislation has been passed to open datasets by default both at the Federal level and in multiple states, it isn’t always straight forward. Many datasets contain sensitive information such as people’s names or addresses and this information needs to be made anonymous before the sets can be released. At this stage, Code for Australia is working with government to release, as Alvaro puts it, ‘quick wins with the data sets, not investing too much time in what they are releasing. So this is anonymous, this is safe, let’s release it.’

Code for Australia is approaching their vision of an Open Government through three core programs:

FELLOWSHIP
The Fellowship is a 12 month service program where civic-minded developers, designers, and product managers join small start-up teams and partner with a government department to collaborate. The first fellow, Steve Bennett, ‘has been made available to any state or local government agency to help in their open data journey … he will be at Federation Square during Link Festival talking about his experience in government, where the state of open data is and what he has been working on – which is pretty exciting.’ says Alvaro.

Link Festival, Australia’s premier design for social change event, will be held at Federation Square’s Deakin Edge on 16–17 February. Alvaro will be joining Steve for the session Code for your country – How open data and open government can better serve citizens. Alvaro describes it as ‘a roll-up your sleeves sort of session … you don’t necessarily have to have technical skills. There are many different way to work in that space.’ More information on Link Festival can be found at www.linkfestival.com.au.

CIVIC LAB
Alvaro describes the Civic Lab, as ‘the essence of what Code for Australia is. We want to bring industry, citizens and government together.’ Civic Labs are volunteer led events held in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane where ‘whoever rocks up is the right person to be there. If you’ve got an interest in transportation, then let’s talk about transportation. If you want to learn how to visualise data let’s do that. So, whatever the interests are then that’s sort of how it’s facilitated.’

February’s meet ups, which run from the 20–22 to coincide with International Open Data Day, look set to be a great chance for first time participants to get involved – for more information visit www.codeforaustralia.org/civic-lab.

INCUBATOR
Whereas the Civic Lab is focused on citizens and the Fellowship on government, the Incubator is geared towards industry: ‘If you have an idea on how to service the government better, we provide an environment for you to grow that idea into market.’ Through the Incubator program, Code for Australia offers training and mentoring to start-up companies to help them ‘create solutions for government with the expertise we develop through our other programs.’

Through these endeavours, Alvaro and Code for Australia are laying the foundations to ‘create a space where everyone has the opportunity to get involved to make sure we create a government by the people for the people in the 21st century.’