The following guest blog post is written by Ilir Zherka, executive director of the National Conference on Citizenship. Related link 

“Challenge to use civic data to meet community needs”  — Knight Foundation press release

Today, together with the support of the Knight Foundation, we’re launching the Civic Data Challenge—an exciting opportunity to use information in the service of advocacy. The Challenge will engage diverse groups of passionate individuals to build tools that strengthen civic life and have direct impact on public decision-making.

The challenge builds upon the successes of our launch in 2012. Last year’s winning teams spanned the country and included undergraduate students and nonprofit leaders, financial analysts and graphic designers and coders. Their entries taught us new and valuable lessons about the role that civic health plays in creating stronger communities.

This year, we want to go even deeper to make sure that participants create tools that are responsive to community needs. We’re expanding the challenge to include:

• Three challenge phases—from idea-sharing to piloting entries—that encourage data scientists, coders, developers and designers to come together to build useful entries.
• Grand prizes to teams that create exceptionally useful products AND work with community partners to successfully implement those tools.
• The opportunity to improve entries with the help of a team of expert advisors.

The Civic Data Challenge is asking all interested citizens to get involved –join us at www.CivicDataChallenge.org.

The Civic Data Challenge is supported by our launch partners at Innovation Enterprise behind 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 sponsor Iron.io and promotional partners CEOs for Cities, Data Kind and Code for America.

By Ilir Zherka, executive director of the National Conference on Citizenship.