App Contest How-to Guide, Plus a New Contest from USDA

Posted by: Natalya Minkovsky, Senior Strategist Jan 25, 2010 0 Comments

A few months ago, I shared my excitement about DC’s Apps for Democracy contest, which yielded almost 50 apps in 30 days using the District’s open data. Well, if your government agency or organization wants to repeat the success of Apps for Democracy, you now have a handy step-by-step guide, courtesy of iStrategy Labs, the company that sponsored Apps for Democracy together with the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer.

The DIY guide breaks down the approach to an app contest into nine core components, and then further breaks down the components into tasks. There are plenty of charts and illustrations, including a color-coded project timeline. The guide also does a nice job of speaking directly and encouragingly to government agencies. Download the guide here.

And in other contest news, if you haven’t already checked out USDA’s Innovations for Healthy Kids Challenge, get to it—it’s a great opportunity for developers to make a difference.

USDA’s Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services recently launched the first part of this multi-phased initiative: the Web Games for Healthy Kids Contest. The contest is a “call to American entrepreneurs, software developers, and students to use the recently released Nutrition Dataset to create innovative and creative web-based learning tools (applications or games) that motivate children, especially ‘tweens’ (aged 9-12), to eat healthier.”

Future Innovations for Healthy Kids Challenge contests will include producing motivating public service announcements and creating healthful recipes to be used in schools.

Having recently completed work on nutrition-related games and activities for the Army National Guard, I’m looking forward to checking out the cool games that come out of the Healthy Kids Challenge.

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Natalya Minkovsky

Senior Strategist

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