News Digital Earth Australia recognised for excellence

The Digital Earth Australia (DEA) program has been recognised for its innovative platform, stakeholder engagement, and best practice at the Australian Government Digital Awards.

Head of DEA, Dr Trevor Dhu, said the awards are a recognition of the team’s dedication to building a platform that was fit for purpose.

“From the very beginning of this program, Geoscience Australia has strived to provide a platform that lets satellite imagery help solve real world problems,” Dr Dhu said.

“In the 2017–18 and 2018–19 Federal Budgets, we secured over $50 million towards Digital Earth Australia.

“This funding is being utilised by DEA to develop and operationalise innovative technology that enables other government agencies to transform their work and stimulate economic growth by making it easier for all sectors of industry to access and use satellite data.

These awards are a fantastic acknowledgement that we’re on exactly the right track and are having exactly the sort of impacts that we set out to achieve when we first pitched this platform.

They also acknowledge the work that we have achieved with our many stakeholders, including other government agencies, FrontierSI, industry bodies and the DEA Labs seed funding projects.

Last night, the DEA program won the award for Outstanding Digital Platform of the Year, for its work on the DEA hybrid cloud platform.

DEA was also a finalist in the following categories:

• Excellence in government-industry partnership: for our partnership with Cibo Labs in the DEA Labs seed funding project.
• Excellence in multi-agency partnership: for our work with federal and state governments on the Waterbody Area Mapping and Monitoring tool.
• Outstanding Individual Contribution — Digital Champion: Robbi Bishop-Taylor, DEA product developer.

Last week, the DEA Industry Strategy — which includes successful initiatives like DEA Labs seed funding — also took out the ‘People and Community’ Award at the 2019 Asia-Pacific Spatial Excellence Awards (NSW/ACT).

This award recognised the efforts of Digital Earth Australia and FrontierSI in developing a strategy based on Australian industry needs.