GovHack has returned for 2015, with the competition bringing 1,800 people together to innovate, collaborate and apply their creative skills to open government data.

GovHack is an annual competition that brings together geeks, digital creatives, data analysts, story tellers, entrepreneurs and civic society enthusiasts to work together in teams over 46 hours to explore, mash up, ideate and communicate your concepts using open Government data.

GovHack, which this year ran from 3 to 5 July, celebrates technical and creative capacity, opens the door to collaboration with governments, and has helped to advance the cause of open data to drive social and economic value.

This year IP Australia was a National Agency Supporter for the first time. The group asked the GovHackers to develop an easy way for non-experts to access and use the IP Government Open Data to find out where, who and what Intellectual Property (IP) exists in Australia.

Competitors came up with several innovative ways to integrate IP data, such as, the Tell-Tale Hearts project to integrate IP data to show Australia’s Economic Heartbeat.

But IP data was not the only data on hand. For example, two high school students used City of Melbourne Data to create new-era Hobo signs.

Another interesting project from Canberra was Minecraft Your City, using data from Geoscience Australia and CSIRO to create a fully playable Minecraft world of Canberra.

Here are some of the other projects that made use of government data over the weekend:

Patentstori.es (Canberra)
Neuron - connecting like minds (Sydney)
Let’s Breed Plants & IPs (Melbourne)
Patent Finder App (Adelaide)
A Patent to the past (Ballarat)
Patents & Insights for Innovation (Camperdown)