Organize a Civic Apps Competition (CAC) in your city. This practical guide provides best practices for each phase of the process, based largely on the authors’ firsthand experience planning and managing Apps for Metro Chicago (A4MC). You’ll learn everything from setting goals and creating a budget to running the competition and measuring the outcome.
CACs provide software programmers with platforms for building effective apps, using open government data as a way to foster community involvement and make government more transparent. This handbook helps you address serious questions about the process and shows you what’s required for making your competition successful.
Gain insights from the authors’ survey of 15 CACs in the US and Canada
Get guidelines for establishing specific goals, and evaluate results with reliable metrics
Understand major costs involved and build a budget around partners and sponsors
Determine participation incentives, prize categories, and judging
Avoid unstructured data sets by being selective when choosing public datasets
Learn how the authors handled roadblocks during the A4MC competition
Discover ways to sustain lasting community interest once the CAC is over
Chapter 1 The Pursuit of Accountability, Efficiency, and Economic Growth
History of Apps Contests
Next Chapter: What CACs Create
Chapter 2 Benefits of Civic Apps Competitions
Case Study
What Civic Apps Competitions Achieve
Next Chapter: Goals and Metrics
Chapter 3 Identifying Goals and Metrics for Your Apps Competition
Translating Benefits into Goals and Metrics
Identifying Your Competition’s Ideal Goals and Metrics of Success
Kate specializes in helping organizations adapt to disruptive technologies and ideas. When Walmart decided to go green, Kate designed and led campaigns to engage their 1.2 million employees with sustainability. When Mayor Rahm Emanuel decided to make Chicago more transparent, Kate led the launch team for the 2011 Apps for Metro Chicago Competition. She is currently a co-author on the O'Reilly Media Guide to Civic Apps Competitions and is looking for the next disruptive idea to play with.
Virginia Carlson, Ph.D. is a national figure in the role of information resources and their role in harnessing information for urban revitalization. She has developed and applied her expertise in a variety of settings, including: identifying data sources for the State of Illinois Index of Leading Indicators; constructing economic indicators for redevelopment options in Gorj County, Romania; identifying key data intervention points for federal data as the Deputy Director for Data Policy at the Brookings Institution’s Urban Markets Initiative; and designing the strategic information approach for the campaign to induce The Boeing Company to move its headquarters to Chicago. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Public Data Users.
Comments about oreilly Civic Apps Competition Handbook:
Good use of real world data on how these things work.
9/12/2012
(1 of 1 customers found this review helpful)
4.0
Recommended to help Open Government+
By Zalakain
from Sarriguren, Nafarroa
About Me Designer, Developer, Maker
Pros
Common Sense
Concise
Well-written
Cons
Lacks More Samples
Best Uses
Entrepreneur
Government
Promoter
Comments about oreilly Civic Apps Competition Handbook:
I decided to read this short (77 pages) handbook just for the simple reason that I am interested in Open Government/Data and Apps, so the mix always rings a bell.
The handbook is a concise read written by Kate Eyler-Werve and Virginia Carlson based on their experiences running the Apps for Metro Chicago contest. Filled with advices and, best of all, common sense judgements (do you really need a huge budget to run a valuable contest? where does the real value of the contest reside?) that can be taken home. All it takes to read it is just more than an afternoon, but the way it is organized (7 chapters, starting on the ROI elements of a CAC contest and finishing on how to build on top of any contest's outcome) is so logical that all the main aspects that must be known in order to run a CAC contest (or any software-related contest, to be honest) are covered.
A read I recommend if you are into CAC or want to push on the use of Open Government in your community. (Just don't expect to find a plethora of ideas for your next killer-app, though! ;).
