LinkedUp is not alone in organizing an open data competition. While data competitions and challenges are not new to universities and research institutes there is now an increasing number taking place outside the academic space. Here are some example competitions where open data has played, or is playing a role.
The Open Education Challenge
Website: http://openeducationchallenge.eu
The Open Education Challenge, launched in partnership with the European Commission, is part of Startup Europe. It is an opportunity for cutting-edge education startups to receive mentoring and seed funding through the European Incubator for Innovation in Education, and get direct access to investors from day one. The competition is not focused on open data but open data use is encouraged.
Dates: January – July 2014
The Open Data Challenge series
Website: http://theodi.org/challenge-series
The Open Data Institute is running a series of seven challenges to generate innovative and sustainable open data solutions to social challenges. So far the areas covered have been education, crime and justice and energy + environment.
Dates: 2014
The Open Humanities Awards
Website: http://openhumanitiesawards.org
The second round of the Open Humanities Awards with €20,000 worth of prizes on offer in two dedicated tracks: Open track: for projects that either use open content, open data or open source tools to further humanities teaching and research; and DM2E track: for projects that build upon the research, tools and data of the DM2E project.
Dates: 30 April – 30 May 2014
Coding Da Vinci
Website: http://codingdavinci.de
By January 2014, 30 million objects have been digitised solely via the Europeana. Coding Da Vinci is the first German cultural Hackathon and will be held in Spring 2014 in Berlin. It is a joint project between the German Digital Library, the service shop digitization Berlin, the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and Wikimedia Germany.
Dates: April – July 2014
RLUK Hack Day
Website: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rluk-hack-day-rlukhack-tickets-11197529111
Working with The European Library, RLUK will soon be releasing over 17m bibliographic records as LOD. We want to invite developers from the library, academic and general coding community to realise the full impact of this very large open dataset. We want to encourage people to engage with the data, reuse it and make it usable for others in the pursuit of research and learning that will benefit all. RLUK is running an initial Hack Day at Senate House Library, London. A one-day event, the day is aimed at encouraging direct development of the dataset, and will be a hands-on BYOD set of sessions for those with a practical interest in or experience of developing services and prototypes using LOD.
Dates: 4 May 2014
Future Hacks
Website: http://open.glasgow.gov.uk/hackathon/
A series of four hackathons organized by Future City looking at four distinct themes – public safety, energy, health and transport.
Dates: March – June 2014
Lak Data Challenge
Website: http://www.solaresearch.org/events/lak/lak-data-challenge/
The LAK Data Challenge was first run in 2013 and asked developers to build on the LAK data set: structured metadata from research publications in the field of learning analytics. The Challenge ran again in 2014.
Dates: 2013 – 2014
The Mass EduData Challenge
Website: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-mass-edudata-challenge-registration-11540647387
Dates: 28 May – 8 July 2014
The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) maintains extensive data sets on education from all of the state’s 351 cities and towns and is seeking to spark additional engagement and innovation around its data through the launch of the Mass EduData Challenge- a six week competition aimed at engaging the public in viewing, analyzing, and visualizing Massachusetts educational data to produce new insights, tools, and opportunities to improve outcomes and drive social benefit in the Commonwealth.
Apps4Europe
Website: http://www.appsforeurope.eu
Dates: 2014
Apps for Europe is a support network that provides tools to transform ideas for data based apps into viable businesses. They are bringing together a powerful European network of individuals and organisations who have been involved in open data programmes and in supporting promising ideas to help ideas to scale. As part of their programme they are supporting a series of data events, competitions and hackathons.
Talk of Europe
Website: http://www.talkofeurope.eu/cfp/
The Talk of Europe project is publishing the proceedings of the European Parliament as linked open data. They are organising three creative camps in which developers and academic researchers will come together to build tools or links with other datasets. The first creative camp will be held in Hilversum, The Netherlands from 6-10 October 2014.
Dates: October 2014 onwards
The Open Stockholm Award
Website: http://www.openstockholmaward.se
To promote the development of an information market and encourage the development of smart services, the City of Stockholm has created an action plan to open up the City of Stockholm’s data sources and is running the Open Stockholm Award.
Dates: March – April 2014
Science for Solutions open data competition
Website: http://www.qld.gov.au/dsitia/initiatives/science-open-data/about-competition/
A competition to promote the use, reuse and repurposing of science that is freely available on the Queensland Government open data portal. The aim is to encourage data visualisations, application development or other unique treatments of the science datasets provided by the Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts.
Dates: February – June 2014
Open Culture Data Challenge
Website: http://www.opencultuurdata.nl
The annual challenge is currently closed but Culture Harvests will be running an open culture data hack on four Sundays with developers who can help load data up for the brand new Culture Open Data API. The API will be used for the Open Culture Data Challenge to be launched on 14 May 2014.
Dates: May – June 2014
Open Data Stories
Website: http://blog.okfn.org/2014/02/20/enter-the-partnership-for-open-datas-impact-stories-competition/
Partnership for Open Data (POD) is inviting people to share stories about how open data has positively impacted you, or those around you; technologically, politically, commercially, environmentally, socially, or in any other way.
Dates: April 2014
Canadian Open Data Experience (CODE)
Website: https://www.canadianopendataexperience.com/
Date: February – March 2014
The first national Open Data hackathon in Canada, a 48-hour competition hosted by XMG, one of the largest indie mobile gaming studios in Canada, and supported by the Government of Canada.
Career Hack
Website: http://careerhack.appchallenge.net
The CareerHack contest, run by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), asked developers to find innovative and inspiring ways of using data made available through its Labour Market Information (LMI) for All data site.
Dates: February 2014
Land Registry Open Data Challenge
Website: http://www.landregistry.gov.uk/campaigns/open-data-challenge
A challenge to develop a creative idea that clearly demonstrates how the Land Registries public data can make a positive impact on the UK economy. The competition marked the release of the Land registries price paid data.
Dates: June – November 2013
Apps voor Ouders Challenge 2012
Website: http://www.openonderwijsdata.nl/2012/05/30/hackathon-workshop-apps-voor-ouders-challenge/
The Dutch network Open Education Data ran an open data hackathon using open data sets from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science released through data.duo.nl.
Dates: 2012
Open Data Challenge
Website: http://opendatachallenge.org
The Open Data Challenge was the first large-scale open data competition with 20,000 euros in prizes to win, and a total of 430 entries from 24 EU Member States. The winners were selected by an all star cast of open data gurus, and announced by Vice President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes at the Digital Agenda Assembly in Brussels.
Dates: April – July 2011
The Stationery Office OpenUp Challenge
Website: http://openup.tso.co.uk
The Stationery Office in the UK launched the OpenUp challenge in 2011 to encourage ideas for how government data could be re-used to benefit communities both locally, and nationwide.
Dates: 2011
