Published on the 20/10/2015 | Written by Beverley Head

A couple of hundred people gathered in Sydney on Saturday for Australia’s first policy hackathon, focusing on just ten of the 284 ideas collected in advance of the event…

The brainchild of assistant innovation minister Wyatt Roy, and facilitated by startup incubator Blue Chilli, the event is seen as just a first step toward forging stronger ties between the tech sector and the nation’s policy makers.

In all 284 ideas were contributed to the website constructed to promote the event. Some were hare brained, others smarter – and by Saturday they had received almost 9,500 votes between them.

The ten ideas that were brought to the event Saturday were each then pitched to attendees, and teams formed to explore and develop the ideas further over a five hour period. There were proposals for;

• Policies to develop innovative, agile and adaptive practices in Australian medium and large businesses
• Incentives to develop social enterprises
• Policies to improve gender equality and diversity within the innovation ecosystem
• Ideas to encourage the use of intellectual property by Australian businesses
• Incentives to attract capital to improve the quality of startup businesses and the incubators and accelerators that support the
• Ways to improve how universities operate and commercialise in the innovation ecosystem
• Initiatives to make government procurement and data, processes more open, innovative and adaptive
• Activities that foster global understanding and awareness amongst people in the innovation ecosystem
• Techniques to improve education systems to foster innovative thinking, creativity, entrepreneurship and digital skills
• Ways to improve and expand the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme (NEIS) to foster startups.

While each team pitched and there was feedback from the audience, which included Wyatt Roy and Paul Shetler, head of Australia’s Digital Transformation Office, this was never going to be a carbon copy of a software hack where the best idea receives a wad of cash and the opportunity to go and create a minimal viable product.

Australia’s policy wheels – even under innovation-hungry Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull – grind more slowly.

What the event did however was telegraph the fact that this is a Government prepared to do things differently, to listen to the voices of the innovation community, and at the same time get a good measure of the issues that plague Australia’s tech sector. Meanwhile the participation of public servants gave industry participants in the Policy Hack a better understanding of how Government and the bureaucracy operate and the constraints that persist.

In an opinion article published in the Australian newspaper the day before the event Roy said that the most important outcome of the process would not just be the ideas that emerged at the event, but “the degree to which relationships are forged between our entrepreneurs, innovators, educators, scientists, researchers – and public servants,” which could then be leveraged during the next round of policy discussions.

Hopefully that won’t take too long.