Mix & Mash Recap
I couldn’t believe my eyes when the winners of the 2010 Mix and Mash competition were announced last Friday on Twitter. I read my name for the price of the “Best Visitor Experience using DOC Data” and the “Supreme Mashup” categories (the “Supreme Mashup” is the highest price).
This is more than I have hoped for and a great honour.
The Mix and Mash competition is about creating useful and beautiful mashups and remixes with open data from New Zealand institutions.
My entry is a website to find information about all NZ walking/tramping/hiking tracks: http://nzwalksinfo.co.nz/.
Motivation
The minute I saw that the Department of Conservation made available all the geo data of their walking tracks and huts, I knew I wanted to build a website with this data.
The main idea of the site is to get relevant information on walking tracks in a very visual way. While there are lots of tramping websites already (including the excellent website of the DOC itself), I always found it quite tedious to get to some important information quickly - if it was provided at all.
Here are some of the questions I ask myself quite often and that I think are tedious to answer with existing sites:
- What tracks are available near my current location or a location I’m interested in visiting?
- Will it be stressful with a lot of ups and downs?
- Will I only walk through forest or will I have some nice views along the way?
While I haven’t answered all of these question to my full satisfaction, yet, I think this first version is a very good starting point.
The elevation profile for example was a top priority for me, because it’s so important in my opinion. But yet I can’t find this information most of the time. The DOC makes some elevation profiles available, but only for very few tracks and then you have to get a brochure from a DOC office or download the PDF file.
Future development
Of course, I wanted to do more for this entry, but I ran out of time. I think the site is useful already (eh… obviously ;-)), but it can become a lot more useful in the future while sticking to a simple, uncluttered user interface.
I have lots of ideas and I hope I can implement them in the months to come. Winning the competition definitely is plenty of fuel for my motivation.
Mix and Mash is great
I love the idea behind the competition and I think all entries show that it’s a brilliant idea for NZ institutions to make their data available freely. I think it is a great success. Please check out all the other exciting entries on the Mix and Mash website.
Thank you for this awesome competition. It makes the internet better.
