3 open data teams competing for NC Datapalooza prizes

Eight teams made pitches to a panel of judges at the All Thing Open conference on Oct. 27 and three advanced to the 4th annual NC Datapalooza finale.

On Monday, Nov. 14, North Carolina’s open data competition for 2016 will come to a conclusion during the final pitch competition hosted at Red Hat Annex in downtown Raleigh. The three remaining teams will give their final presentations to win the grand prize of $5,000 and a $500 prize for the best use of ESRI technology. In addition to the pitch competition, attendees will hear from leaders in open data, government, and technology.

Meet the teams

The teams are judged on criteria that include impact of the project, scalability, the progress and execution for creating an minimum viable product (MVP), the user experience, and of course, the use of open data.

Of the teams that presented at All Things Open, these three will be competing for the final prizes:

OverEasy —OverEasy is solving the problem of access for anyone who stands to benefit from open geospatial data. The user makes just two decisions and they receive a beautiful, useful and printable report. The software is web-based and can sit on top of the many open data sources and APIs currently published on the web.
NC Food Inspector —The team assembled at National Day of Civic Hacking and NC CityCamp / NC DataPalooza events with the purpose of extending the use of open restaurant inspection and violation data from Wake County. Building off of the success of the existing Code for Durham application, NC Food Inspector, the team will add CDC Food Borne Illness Risk Factor data to the existing violations data. The team is a mix of front end and back end developers, designers, project management, and interested citizens.
New Cartographers —Building off a project presented at CityCamp NC, Kids Transit enables students and parents to identify safe routes to school, organize ad-hoc walking or biking groups, improve community involvement, identify barriers to pedestrian and cycling mobility, and helps school systems reduce bus use to improve the air quality of schools.

Speaking at the event will be Charles Gaddy from Global Data Consortium, Bill Greeves from Wake County, and Nick Harvey from Red Hat.

Judges for the final competition include: