Welcome to GovHack, a nation-wide carnival of innovation that drew about 1000 people from across Australia this weekend to work with public government data.

In eight cities, analysts, developers and interested others gathered to vie for glory and prize money in the nation's largest ''hackathon''.

Paul Taylor from science education provider Quantum Victoria and his partner Kim Tinson, who works in childcare, used a 3D printer to create keychains and rings graphing asylum seeker boat arrivals to Australia since 1976. ''We decided we wanted to make data fun, meaningful and engaging to the general public. We want people to enjoy data,'' Mr Taylor said.

Previously the event was held only in Canberra and Sydney, but this year it expanded to Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Tasmania.

About 150 people attended the Melbourne event, which was held at Fairfax Media's Melbourne headquarters.

Data analyst Andrew Grealy and his team devised a tool to download NSW crime data going back 17 years and turn it into an interactive dashboard allowing people to track offences by area.

He said the biggest issue his team faced was the way the data was presented, as they had to spend a lot of time converting the information into a form that they could analyse.

Other projects at GovHack Melbourne included visualisations of census data, an app for discovering the native flora and fauna in an area, and a tool for translating government data websites into other languages.

Organiser Pia Waugh said about 150 teams from across the country had entered GovHack in the hope of competing for a slice of $170,000 in prizes.

''GovHack is all about trying to bring together government people along with industry, academia and developers - the fairly awesome technical community we have in Australia - to do some pretty cool stuff,'' she said. ''It's about getting better transparency,'' she said.

The Age was a sponsor of GovHack Melbourne.

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