Hacking for Change: Government data teams join forces at the ‘Snowflake x GTM Hackathon’

In a pioneering effort to drive cross-government collaboration and harness data for public good, Government Transformation Magazine and Snowflake recently hosted a hackathon bringing together data professionals from eight government bodies. 

Held at Snowflake’s HQ, the event challenged participants to tackle real-world issues - from health inequalities to infrastructure planning - by sharing data and building practical, data-driven solutions. 

Through a mix of teamwork, open data sharing, and cutting-edge tools, the hackathon showcased the power of government agencies working together to solve complex societal challenges. 

This collaborative event not only highlighted the importance of data in public sector transformation but also revealed how innovative partnerships can break down silos and spark fresh insights across departments.

Hacking the National Data Strategy

“Data is right at the heart of our transformation, and is the driving force to deliver optimal cross-governmental working, and seamless citizen experiences,” Craig Suckling, Chief Data Officer of HMG. 

Each of the Government’s 5 key missions requires cross-government collaboration and data sharing at some level. As the National Data Strategy makes clear, smoother and more coordinated movement of data across the public sector will continue to enable better decision making, improve public services and for the context of today, fulfil the promise of a mission-driven government. 

We and our friends at Snowflake are well-aware of the potential that cross-agency sharing brings and through our partnership, brought together eight government bodies at the Snowflake HQ to undertake the first GTM x Snowflake Hackathon. 

By providing data professionals with a clear challenge and a secure, playful and collaborative environment to express their talent, we hope to foster and share the potential of an open data sharing, public sector environment. 

Starting with the power tools, we gave each of the eight participating government bodies four hours and free trial access to the Snowflake Marketplace, covering over 630 data providers and more than 2800 live, ready-to-use data, apps and AI products. All they had to bring was a problem they’d like to solve and a dataset they could share with the rest of the participating teams. 

Westminster Council, fittingly named ‘The Westminster Wizards’, came into the Hackathon with a clear idea of the challenge they wanted to solve. “A baby born in the North borough of Westminster has an average life expectancy of 76 years whilst a baby born in Knightsbridge and Belgravia has a life expectancy of 94, making the Borough’s health inequality the largest in the country,” their team captain explained. 

The Council’s #2035 collaborative programme with Imperial Health Trust aims to cut the Borough’s life expectancy gap in half by 2035, and so the Westminster Wizards aimed to use the Hackathon as a way of developing a closer understanding of whether differences in the air quality of wards were contributing to the Borough’s disparate health outcomes.

Other challenges on the day included, developing a clearer view of how air pollution and population growth would affect demand on GP services; how resources can be more effectively allocated to the most deprived populations in upper-tier authorities and how to better identify brownfield sites suitable for residential property building.

Hacking the system

As the participants hacked their hearts away, we saw the rise of some pretty incredible applications.

Each team had their own technical advisor and through the Snowflake Platform, were able to easily conduct intergovernmental data sharing, and convert their analyses into a user-friendly application interface via Streamlit. Some of these applications included: 

• A visualisation of where housing, employment, and healthcare impact each other in upper tier authorities
• Assess the impact of rising population numbers on NHS resources and the future costs of health and social care
• A visual map of brownfield sites that are suitable for development, based on data about local amenities, planning restrictions, and more

“I’ve been with the NHS for the past 10 years and data is a key part of our work. Using Snowflake datasets helped us understand how we can use that data to correlate the many work we do within NHS and the data that is provided in Snowflake. We learnt a lot and we shared a lot so it was a wonderful day for us,” Kailash Hemani, Senior Delivery Manager, NHS. 

And the winner is…

Government Transformation Magazine announced the winners of the Snowflake x GTM Hackathon at Government Data + AI Summit. 

Our judges, Strategic Command’s Data and Analytics Platform Chief Product Owner, George McCrea, our co-founder, David Wilde, and Snowflake’s Senior Manager for Sales Engineering, Erwin van Laar, determined the winner based on which team used the broadest number of data sets, collaborated with other teams and were able to create a complete and viable solution. 

We would like to extend our congratulations to the ONS team, made up of Mary Cleaton, Dalia Gala, Dana Seman Bobulska, Shuayra Bhagat and Lucy Astley-Jones, who in just a few hours were able to create a multi-page Streamlit app, that brought together data from the ONS, DWP and Defra to map disability entitlement for respiratory diseases at a local authority level, as well as join up air particulate concentration over the years per local authority with the number of people entitled to disability living allowance specifically for respiratory disease. 

By taking the first steps in identifying correlation between disability benefits claims and respiratory diseases at a local level, their findings show promise in being able to support local policy evaluations in measuring the effectiveness of investing in air quality in reducing the overall health burden. 

One team member emphasised, “With limited public finances, it’s difficult to make those cross-cutting decisions about investing in people’s health and lives. This kind of comparison makes that a lot easier.”

Dalia Gala, a senior data engineer in Revenue Scotland and recipient of the Snowflake Trophy reflected, “I really enjoyed the Hackathon. We don’t use Snowflake currently so it was very valuable for me as a member of the Civil Service to learn more about modern technologies as well as have hands-on experience using Snowflake.

A lot of really interesting insights were produced today, so many amazing projects were built and I saw so many people from so many departments sharing their data and using it to enrich their insights. I’m just so grateful to have been here today!”