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Sunlight Labs Offers $25,000 For Data.gov Apps
Andurin writes "With the launch of Data.gov, Sunlight Labs is offering $25,000 in prize money for developers who create apps that use newly-released federal government data. Data.gov is paving the way for citizens to become more engaged with their government, by providing for the first-time a clearinghouse of federal data in developer-friendly formats. The Apps for America 2 contest aims to find the best applications that rely on Data.gov, whether it be a client application, an iPhone app, or data visualization. Also, the first, second and third prize winners will receive airfare and hotel placement for a trip to Washington DC. While in Washington, DC, they'll attend an awards ceremony at the Gov2.0 Summit by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb."
I applaud this effort. We need more contests like these to help promote open information access, and ultimately gain a competitive edge over other countries. (I'm looking at you China!)
"Wanna find the targets in the US most vulnerable to terrorist attack? There's an app for that!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
An iron-clad immunity clause/contract.
Sorry, but those amounts are not anywhere near enough for the (opportunity cost) risk I'd be taking by competing. Unknown odds + subjective rating = very low odds of payout.
Offer me a guaranteed salary in that range, and I'll make something worth your while.
...'FBI Most Wanted' Concentration. Pretty clever!
The Army reading list
I'm wondering, is it possible that by using all this data, the government is in essence, spying on back on us, monitoring the usage of the data?
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
If there's a prize for best tinfoil hat theory of the month, I'll writing you in for it.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Wow these are some amazing data sets . http://www.data.gov/catalog#raw
It is limited to geological, environmental, and weather datasets. Ohh yea, and the usability of the website is about as good as you'd expect from the government.
...how about making those divs/viewports/things-containing-the-checkboxes a little bigger here? There are 30 checkboxes and you can only see two at a time; I feel like a Cylon!
The Army reading list
CDC data for communicable diseases with a nice google map overlay seems a prime mobile app to me.
"My fingers Emit sparks of fire in Expectation of my future labours." William Blake
There is divorce data. There is also birthday data. The astrologists also tell us which zodiac signs go together. This'd be a prime way to statistically prove or disprove their claims: see if divorce rates are higher between mismatched zodiacs.
I once made a bot which graphed Xanga. Each person was a node, and there was an edge between A and B if A had a link to B in his/her profile. We could maybe graph the US this way. See who knows who and through which people. Then you can do fun stuff like try to find the two most disconnected people (longest path... too bad that is NP-Complete), or see if the 6 degrees of separation thing is true.
You're also against people saying "Merry Christmas" since the US has "seperation between church and state," aren't you. They were giving a specific instance of something someone could develop, not promoting the iPhone.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
I think one underestimated the combined laziness of the masses if you think that simply having easy access will encourage "citizens to become more engaged with their government". At least not in any significant numbers.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Leave it to the government to publish data that Google can not read.
Have you ever had anyone mention the library of congress web site as a great resource for example?
Living in Chile
When Resolver Systems started their $25,000 competition for the best spreadsheet examples for Resolver One, I saw it as a great opportunity to learn IronPython and play around with a new program that looked interesting. I spent some free time having fun coding in a new language, and the Texas Holdem Monte Carlo Hand Evaluator worksheet that I made ended up being pretty useful. Oh... and it won one of the rounds, so I see it as time very well spent :-P
Now this competition is a bit more structured and has much less of a "fun" factor, but it still is a good incentive to look at the data that is available and try and think of new ways to visualize or use it.
You're also against people saying "Merry Christmas" since the US has "seperation between church and state," aren't you. They were giving a specific instance of something someone could develop, not promoting the iPhone.
No seperation of church and state anywhere in the constitution, FYI.
I noticed the DEA wasn't on the list of agencies.. No data could be found on the 20+ Billion/year 'drug war'.
Way to stay on topic, man. (FWIW, the First Amendment, with its Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, is generally understood to be the constitutional rationale for the "separation of church and state". But I'd understand you missing that if your idea of legal research is grepping for a literal (and misspelled) string.)
data.gov is a super idea, long overdue, but, the available of data in a computer usable form is very scarce. Certainly the EPA has more than a handful of CSV or XML downloads available from its databases. Everything should be public this way. It's just going to take millions, if not billions of dollars, to get there. Shall we start bidding?
This is my sig.
Facts are stubborn things, "Generally Understood" does not a fact make. So go ahead and attack my spelling but the facts will remain the same.
Are you sure you didn't mean:
"Data.gov is paving the way for citizens to become more /enraged/ with their government"
Merry Christmas? Nice straw man. And I bet you get angry when people say "Happy Holidays" to you.
Whilst I wouldn't have phrased it quite like the OP did, I did think the same thing about the unnecessary and obligatory Iphone slashvertisement. Of course it's promotion - "Hey you can do this on your XXX" is promotion, why do you think even simple product placement in films, with no explicit mention of the product, is so important?
It's also patronising to the reader - we know what products are, we don't need to be told buzzwords such as "Ipod", "Megadrive", "Dell" and so on, instead "mp3 player", "games console" and "computer". And even if that was the reason, why pick the Iphone, and not one of the far more popular phone companies? Oh right, because it's Apple, who need to be mentioned at least once a day in completely unnecessary circumstances (e.g., "Hey, you can read this website On Your Iphone!!!" as we had recently).
Whilst the Iphone mention is taken from the article, they also list: Adobe AIR, Java, Django and Rails. Why aren't these mentioned in the summary, if it's meant to be an accurate summary of the article? It wouldn't be promotion, according to you.
Happy Holidays.
Time to burn some karma...
Do we say web application or we say "Firefox application"? Do we say "car has four tires" or "BMW has four tires"? WTF is wrong with just mentioning phone applications? Since when iphone became the only phone capable of having "applications"? Too many people on too much kool aid here.
Do we really want this data, mostly about us and our government, to be accessible by non-citizens? Seems there is a cost to gathering and producing this data.
While I'm not a fan of government IDs or user accounts, and think that almost all data the government captures, creates, correlates needs to be provided to any US Citizen within 1 year of creation. There are exceptions.
Most of the data that I'm concerned about involves budget and actual spending. I want to know where my money is going and ensure that my priorities are matched in the overall budget. For example, I don't like that over 50% of the federal budget goes to "entitlement programs" like social security. NASA gets around 1%. Is that what you think? Military gets about 20%. I bet you thought it was higher.
A few years ago, I tried to create a pie chart of spending using available data. I couldn't because the data reporting isn't apples-to-apples and budget reporting goes across different government agencies. Boo.