Wake County team wins NC DataJam prize money

Ten teams pitched open data project ideas at NC DataJam this past weekend as part of the CityCamp NC hackathon for a $1,000 first-place prize and a $500 award for best use of ESRI technology.

Ideas ranged from improving accessibility to restaurant health violation information to getting citizens easy access to candidate details and voting information.

Last year’s winners, 11-year old Gavin Clark and father Will Clark, were back in action with a project called Kids Transit that would help students organize walking groups to school along the safest and most efficient route.

[Esri is an international supplier of geographic information system software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications.]

NC DataJam is the kickoff to the NC Datapalooza open data competition and partnered with CityCamp NC this year to facilitate the open data hackathon. The competition started on Saturday morning as individuals pitched project ideas and persuaded people to join their team. Those teams gave 5-minute presentations in the afternoon to a panel of judges.

Teams were judged on their use of open data, impact of their project, their business plan, and the progress and execution from their time at the hackathon. Teams were not required to have a fully baked project at this point in the competition.

The winner is …

The winning team was lead by Wake County Information Services (IS) department with their NC Food Inspector project.

“Wake County is very interested in expanding the use of NC Food Inspector and adding new features and data. This weekend validated our assumptions that this is important to the community’” said Bill Scanlon, NC Food Inspector team lead and Solutions Development Wake County IS.

Scanlon added, “In a few short hours, we partnered with members of our community, and others, to add Wake County data to the existing app, developed a new design to reflect CDC Risk Factors based on health inspection results, and laid out our path towards developing our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) based on the strong foundation developed by Code for Durham. Winning the NC DataJam was a great milestone and we look forward to continuing the project throughout the rest of the NC Datapalooza competition.”

Winning the best use of ESRI technology prize was team Wake Forest NC Open Data, who built a hub collecting existing open data from the Town of Wake Forest since there is no official open data portal from officials.

All teams remain eligible the NC Datapolooza final competition. Submissions are open until Oct. 14 for additional teams to participate. The All Things Open conference will host the NC Datapalooza Team Pitch Competition on Oct. 26 before the finale and demo day on November 14 at Red Hat.

The panel of judges that selected the winning team included:

Jay Dawkins, CEO at Cityzen
Lou Anne Flanders-Stec, VP of Entrepreneurship at Greensboro Partnership Entrepreneur Connection
Shannon Baumman, VP of Products at Pendo
Suja Thomas, Ph.D., Lead Data Scientist at Wedpics
Stewart Rouse, SDK Support Analyst at Esri

The presenters

Team names and project descriptions that presented were:

Good to go GSO – a voting application that aspires to provide information on voter status, polling locations, and candidate information. The hope is to provide voters with digestible information on all things voting to ensure, upon arrival to vote, you have all the information you need.
NC Food Inspector – Enhance NC Food Inspector to include CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) risk factor data.
Greenstem – IoT garden sensors for public gardens with educational opportunities and feeding people.
Vacant to Vital – V2V is a non-profit organization focused on connecting owners of underutilized properties with innovators looking to activate land through urban and suburban agricultural initiatives. Turning empty spaces into vibrant places.
NC School Monitor – Each year NCDPI makes 1.5 million rows of student achievement data available as open data. This goes down to each grade and subject all of NC’s 2,600 public and charter schools. The school monitor enables the public to visualize and compare this data. This encourages parent involvement and choice in their children’s current and potential schools.
Datadog – is a slackbot for open data. Its aim is to make simple, natural language queries return useful information in the form of tables, charts, and maps.
Red Alerts – Produce a weather radio with Raspberry Pi that consults Internet for Polygon information to enable accurate, immediate warnings for tornadoes only.
New Cartographers – Kids transit helps students organize walking/biking groups to school, enables parents and principals to identify unsafe locations, and planners to prioritize pedestrian improvements.
Wake Forest NC Open Data – Currently there is no easy access to open data, specifically for Wake Forest, NC. Data sets exist, but there is no centralized location. The goal is to build a portal for people to easily find and use the data. This solutions will be built using open source tools to host links to the open source data.
OverEasy – is solving the problem of access for anyone who stands to benefit from geospatial data. The user just has to make decisions in order to arrive a beautiful useful, and printable report. The software will be web-based and site on top of the many open data sources and APIs that are available.

Team submissions for NC Datapalooza are open until Oct. 14.

More info at: https://docs.google.com/a/ncsu.edu/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfSK23bqdCWaJRqmlsMqxj9bnnpL_LH9oY9mJHLp-5FYpMFGQ/formResponse

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