The project used a map-based survey tool to collect contributions online. In total there were 302 participants.

During the GovHack weekend, we've been placing context around these contributions and putting a human face to their stories. Specifically, we were seeking to answer two questions:

1. What is it that makes people feel safe or unsafe?
2. How can we improve their sense of safety?

There was a clear pattern of people feeling safe along Lydiard Street near the Gallery, Cinema and bars, especially towards the Mair Street end here. The green dots show submissions from people feeling safe and the darker hexagons show the the areas where more submissions were made. The Armstrong Street restaurant strip also had a positive response, as well as the bars and cafes on Doveton Street corner of Mair Street and the Town Hall precinct on Sturt Street.

In terms of people feeling unsafe, the major hotspot was around Little Bridge Street and the car park between Grenville Street South and Peel Street South shown here. We also have lesser cluster of submissions around the car park behind the Ballarat Library and Civic Hall off Armstrong Street. Another interesting area was around the Ballarat Base Hospital where we had healthcare workers reporting they felt unsafe walking to their cars, and there's some interesting patterns going around here where it looks like they were walking back to their cars.

We also overlayed City of Ballarat's graffiti data shown here in orange, cctv (navy), car parking (maroon), trees (blue), public toilet datasets (aqua) and bollard lighting (yellow). We found a relationship between some of these and our safety data but not others, and this is worth further investigation.