Data Seeker

Team Name

Data By Design

Team Members

Project Description

This is an entry for the GovHack 2020 Queensland Event. The project team is me – Kylie Docherty. I am an IT teacher based in Brisbane with a passion for using openData to create innovative Digital Solutions My project is called Data Seeker.

The problem my project addresses is the unemployment emergency created by the current COVID pandemic. Data Seeker aims to provide an accessible way for marginalised job seekers to connect with job opportunities during our current pandemic and help small businesses impacted by COVID-19 connect with the right people to kickstart their recovery.

Many workplaces now accept applications online and run interviews via zoom.  This is a bit difficult for people in marginalised areas to engage with since many people still have no access to the internet and many of the long-term unemployed do not have access to a smart phone.

What if finding a job was as easy as creating an interest area profile? What if finding employees or customers or training resources was as simple as entering what you need and waiting for the list of recommendations to appear in your inbox. What if people without access to smart phones or the internet could interact with online employment services by sending and receiving a simple text message?

My GovHack 2020 project idea is to create a Job/Employee OpenAPI Recommendation Engine powered by an AWS Neptune Graph Database and link this to the TelstraDev Messaging API. This would provide a way for a range of existing online employment services, job seekers and job keepers to post their data via a simple text message and receive alerts to jobs that match their interest profile.

My prototype is not complete – even as hackers some of us had trouble connecting with teams in our areas of interest .. maybe we also needed an OpenAPI Recommendation engine to find each other. But the work I have done this weekend exploring AWS and Telstra API services and exploring the online data sets relating to the digital divide, job keeper and job seeker statistics and jobs experiencing systemic shortages will lay the foundations for future development of this idea. The endpoint from the tutorial I completed has been posted in the Source Code url link but it is nowhere near complete and is currently experiencing proxy issues.