Tablelands Regional Council in North Queensland was nominated for an Excellence in e-Government Award, which pits its wildfire management app against all sorts of apps from all levels of government. The winner will be announced Wednesday by the Australian Government
The app is a shared mapping and data exchange facility for wildlife management, called the North Queensland Wildfire Mitigation Project (NQWMP). The council was the only local government shortlisted for the awards.
“We are surprised to be shortlisted alongside such significant projects,” said GIS Coordinator Alistair Hart, “I think one of the attractions of this project was our integration of free and open source software to both minimise the capital cost of creating it, but also to take away that ongoing maintenance liability.”
The website is free to use by approved stakeholders, and offers access to over 60 detailed GIS mapping layers, over 140 downloadable fire-district maps prepared for 90 rural fire brigades, some of which had no prior access to current and accurate maps of their brigade areas.
“What we’re doing is breaking down the institutional barriers to data exchange, and we’re providing an ‘in’ for non-government stakeholders in fire mitigation to access that information aswell,” Hart said.
