The OpenDataPhilly catalog was created in order to promote the distribution of useful data sets by government, non-profit and commercial organizations in order to improve transparency, cultivate the community of people that work with data, improve services and enable the development of new services that benefit the Philadelphia region.

While OpenDataPhilly is not a government project, many of the data sets included in the catalog are from municipal government agencies and an important objective of the effort is to promote great availability of such data. Many new data sets, APIs and applications have been added to the catalog since its launch at the end of April 2011. So how might we accelerate the release of data sets by the City of Philadelphia as well as grow the community of people that are care about and are engaged with municipal data? The OpenDataRace contest is one way we are trying to answer this question.

The primary purpose of the contest is to encourage citizens to get involved in the process of open government and cultivating government transparency through the release of data.

The contest will have five phases:

1. Nomination: Non-profit organizations will nominate one or more data sets that would be useful to the organization butcontest/1/rules/ are not currently available.
2. Curation: The Contest Partners will review the nominated data sets and reduce the data sets to approximately 20 that will have broad impact.
3. Voting: The general public can vote for either their favorite organization or the data set they want to see released. The top vote-winners will receive cash prizes.
4. Data Release: The Contest Partners will work with representatives of the City of Philadelphia to attempt to open the data.
5. Application Development: The Contest Partners will hold one or more hack-a-thon events to create applications that use the data.

The contest is open to 501c(3) organizations based in the Philadelphia region. These organizations may receive votes for their proposed data set from anyone in the world. Individuals must register to vote for a data set. Each person may only vote once per week.

The following organizations are collaborating to implement the contest:

• Azavea
• City of Philadelphia Office of Innovation & Technology
• NPower Pennsylvania
• Technically Philly
• William Penn Foundation

There will be cash prizes for the non-profit organizations that win the most votes from the public, as following:

First Prize	$2,000
Second Prize	$1,000
Third Prize	$500

The following rules apply to the operation of the contest:

For the non-profit organization participants:

• Non-profit organizations may nominate more than one data set, but only one data set will move forward to the voting phase
• Data set nominations should adhere to the following guidelines:
  • Data sets gathered by the City of Philadelphia, other public authorities or civic-oriented organizations
  • If the data were made public, it would not result in a privacy or security concern (examples of this might include individual medical records, individual human services records or individual criminal history)
  • The data exists but is not yet available to the public. We are interested in data that is currently gathered but is not available, rather than data that perhaps could be gathered but does not currently exist
  • Data sets will have the potential for a positive social impact if they were available
  • By “data set”, we mean machine-readable, structured data, either downloadable or as a structure data application programming interface (API). For the purposes of this contests, data sets that are currently only available in PDF or MS Word form will be considered “not available”
  • We would like to know how you would use this data if it was available. How will this data help you fulfill your mission?
• Data set nominations will need to include the following information:
  • Organization Name
  • Organization Url
  • Contact Person
  • Contact Phone Number
  • Contact EMail
  • Data Set to Nominate
  • If this data set were available, how would your organization use it?
  • How would this data set contribute to your organization's mission?
• Organizations may encourage people to vote for their project using any means available to them including: outreach, newsletters, email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.
• If your organization wins a prize, you will be expected to have a representative attend one or more of the hack-a-thon events in order to pitch

For the general public:

• You must register with OpenDataPhilly in order to vote
• One vote per week per individual person for this contest. If you vote early, you’ll be able to vote more often!!
• Once registered, you are free to vote for other data sets through the normal OpenDataPhilly nomination system and may vote on multiple data sets in this context
• Any attempt to automate the voting process by generating fake email addresses and names will render those votes ineligible and may disqualify the non-profit organization

Other notes:

• The Contest Partners will make the final selection of data sets that will be made available for voting
• The Contest Partners cannot guarantee that the data sets that win prizes will be released by the City
• While in many cases, software developed at hack-a-thon events will be made available under an open source license, the Contest Partners cannot guarantee this. The availability, release and ownership of a specific software or web site that results from the hack-a-thon events is at the discretion of the individuals developing the software

Date	Event
Monday, Aug 15, 2011	Data set nomination opens
Thursday, Sept 29, 2011	Data set nominations close
Monday, Oct 3, 2011	Voting begins
Thurs, Oct 27, 2011, 11:59pm	Voting ends
Fri, Oct 28, 2011	Winners announced
Mon, Oct 31, 2011	Discussion with City agencies opens
January and February 2012	Hack-a-thon events

The following organizations are sponsoring the contest:

The following individuals have also contributed to the project:

• Melissa Grimm, Grimm & Grove Communications
• Jeff Friedman, City of Philadelphia
• Michelle Schmitt, Temple University, Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project
• Tim Wisniewski, Frankford Special Services District
• Mark Headd, Voxeo