Checkon.Life

Team Name

Team Technocrats

Team Members

Project Description

To say 2020 has been a challenging year would be an understatement! We’ve seen in our communities that some people are struggling more than others; with about one quarter of kiwis struggling to find government covid information, with a large factor being an excess amount of information. To stay afloat and up to date on what’s happening in your suburb there is a glut of information, “fake news”, and social media sharing.

We want to help the 1M+ kiwis struggling to find information during the COVID emergency period, and all the other emergencies life might be throwing at us this year. Everyone needs, and deserves, access to correct information on how to protect themselves and their families.

Meet Checkon – the status page for your suburb. At a glance users can easily see the status of core services in health, safety, utilities, and much more. Checkon aggregates data from over 20 trusted sources, ranging across government and private institutions. The data is timestamped and sourced users can have faith in what they are reading – helping combat the misinformation divide in a world where over 50% of kiwis say they don’t have high faith in news media.

The major benefit of Checkon comes in the NZ leading level of data aggregation, and in the smart use of machine learning which makes learning about your suburb’s status even more impactful. Checkon utilises machine learning in two ways – the first to prioritise what statistics are more relevant to the reader given the current emergency situation (or lack thereof), and the second is to gauge sentiments (positive/negative/neutral) on leading news stories. This allows us to show users with a bird’s eye view of the media landscape, making staying up to date less overwhelming.

When warnings or restrictions are in place Checkon links users directly to the authoritative resources and actions they should take, enabling people to take action in an educated way. This technology allows members of our community to keep their families safe and follow official government guidance. That helps unify our nation’s response to COVID, raising our response ability, and readies us for the next emergency. Our information aggregation quells anxiety, bridges the disinformation gap, and provides an authoritative voice to counter conspiracy theories.

Checkon.life makes staying informed accessible and easy. Check it out!

Data Story

Starting GovHack 2020 we proposed a simple question, is national emergency data easily available for regular people? How about information that's calming and reassuring in times of panic, such as does my local supermarket have toilet paper?

The answer within our group was a strong no, and we found the same results when surveying members of our community. All national emergency data is spread far and wide across various government organisation websites, most too complicated for average people to understand. There was no quick and easily accessible way to check on the pulse of our nation.

We built Checkon to aggregate over 20+ data sources from trusted government agencies and third parties to provide a simple one page live status check of your local area. With Checkon you can see the current COVID-19 alert level, weather warnings, latest earthquakes, power grid outages as well as a variety of other indicators which show the status of your local area.

We were able to build this system by integrating with publicly available government and private API’s and from publicly accessible websites. We used a responsible data collection policy of running all data collection processes as background tasks on long timers to not cause unnecessary traffic to our data sources.