Challenge Yourself: Use Civic Data to Meet Community Needs

by the National Conference on Citizenship (an ADP Partner organization)

The 2013 Civic Data Challenge launches today at the Data Visualization Summit in San Francisco. The Challenge invites participants to turn raw data about civic health into useful applications and visualizations that have direct impact on public decision-making.

Expanded version of last year’s challenge

Last year, the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation  launched the first-ever national Civic Data Challenge. Winning teams spanned the country and included undergraduate students and nonprofit leaders, financial analysts and graphic designers, developers and coders. They brought new eyes, new minds, and new skill sets to the field of civic health to help make this trove of community insight more valuable and accessible to decision makers and the public. For a great recap of last year’s Challenge, read Fast Company’s Visualizing Civic Data to Make the Case for Civic Health.

This year, NCoC, with the support of Knight Foundation, is launching an expanded version of the Challenge. Exciting additions to this year’s Challenge include:

• Three Challenge phases–ideation, creation, and implementation– to help teams come together to build entries that are responsive to community needs.
• Grand prizes to teams that create exceptionally useful products AND work with community partners to successfully implement those tools.
• The opportunity for participants to improve entries along the way with the support of a team of expert advisors.

Submit an idea now

The Civic Data Challenge is asking community leaders, government officials, developers, coders and all interested citizens to get involved. The first step is to submit an idea through the Challenge website, from April 11 – May 19. This ideation phase is an opportunity to creative a collective brainstorm about what tools (apps, websites, videos, and infographics) could be built using civic data. These ideas will inform the parameters of the Challenge and teams will begin building entries to respond May 24 – July 28.  Join us at www.CivicDataChallenge.org .

The Civic Data Challenge is supported by our launch partners at Innovation Enterprise who are organizing the Data Visualization Summit. DVSF is the world’s largest executive led data visualization summit and will be attended by Fortune 500 executives. The challenge is also supported by promotional partners at CEOs for Cities, DataKind, Data Visualization Summit and sponsors at Iron.io.