Steve Bennett

Open Data Expert

Melbourne

Steve Bennett is one of Australia's leading open data experts, from his first tentative contributions to OpenStreetMap (like the Wikipedia of Google Maps) in 2009. In the academic sector, he worked to help researchers share everything from Melbourne's music gigs history to genetic variation of fruit flies by latitude. For several years he helped build a local open data community through co-founding Open Knowledge Melbourne, leading to projects such as the Hipster Map of Melbourne and opentrees.org, a data visualisation of half a million trees maintained by councils around Australia. His prize-winning entries to GovHack, Australia's major open data competition include AusTrails, a portal of hiking and cycling paths, and Can I Boat Here, a water regulation map for boating enthusiasts. In 2016, he used data about bicycle accidents and traffic volume to win a prize at Innovate@Locate.

When PTV released their open timetable API, he made a developer-friendly portal, and helped organise VicTripathon, a hackathon to stimulate app development around it. As Code for Australia's inugural fellow, he helped VicRoads and City of Greater Geelong import gigabytes of photos as open data into the Mapillary street-level imagery platform. He also led the creation of the Open Council Data standards, which help councils combine and reuse data such as footpaths and road closures, and the Open Council Data Toolkit which has helped dozens of councils publish their first datasets.his friends his buddies have done, and for several years ran a cycle tour route planning site based on open data.