Late last year, the Federal government announced its plans to take all government services online by 2025.
The digital transformation will see end-to-end services underpinned by a myGovID that will merge all existing government logins, giving you the ability to do everything online.
But with the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) recently revealing the My Health Record system fell victim to 42 data breaches in the 2017/18 financial year, it is clear that data sharing is still a work in progress.
Data sharing today for government and industry is now simultaneously both an exciting opportunity and a gigantic risk.
ACS is inviting Australia’s tech professionals to assist in addressing some of the challenges around data sharing in a Directed Hack series next month.
The program will be hosted by ACS’ Data Sharing Committee next month and will ask participants to develop an algorithm to protect individual privacy in large numbers of linked, deidentified datasets.
The focus is on “safe” data use and it follows two data sharing whitepapers from the committee, led by NSW Chief Data Scientist, Dr Ian Oppermann.
“A key challenge for data sharing is that there is no way to unambiguously determine if aggregated data contains personal information,” said Oppermann.
The Directed Hack will be similar to a traditional hack-a-thon in working toward the intended outcome.
In the first round, eight teams of three will be formed, ideally comprised by a developer, practitioner and researcher.
The seventh and eighth placed teams will be eliminated after judging in the first round and reformed to create six teams of four for the second week.
This process will continue until round four, when three teams of eight will compete for the top prize.
The Directed Hack will be held in Sydney on Thursday 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th February 2019 from 9am-5pm.
If you are interested in the Directed Hack and wish to participate, an individual nomination can be sent through to Marc.Portlock@acs.org.au.
Nominations close on Thursday 24 January.
