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A Question for Anyone and Everyone to Weigh in on

Submitted by John Geraci on 17 November 2010 - 5:27pm to Discussions.

Just after I wrote my previous post on DIYcity, I was struck with an idea. I've been weighing it back and forth ever since. Should I do it? Should I not do it?. And I'm still not sure what the answer is. So: I'm putting my cards on the table and asking people reading this to weigh in with their own answer, to help me decide.

Here's the idea:

Over the past two years, New York City, Washington D.C. and a spattering of other cities have been home to some great apps contests, and these contests have brought some wonderful new services to those cities. And that's great.

But what about the rest of the world?

What about Sao Paulo? What about Paris? What about New Delhi? What about Ciudad Juarez? What about the twenty-some megacities out there?

All of these cities, cities everywhere, should benefit from the kind of thinking and innovation that gets stirred up by apps contests. Not just NYC and DC.

And, as you know if you follow DIYcity, I've always thought that cities should do these sorts of things together, that by looking over each others' shoulders, rather than operating as city-states, they learn a lot more and get a lot farther.

So here is the question: should DIYcity hold an Apps Contest for everywhere?

It would be a contest just like Big Apps, but for every city in the world. Any developer, anywhere, could participate and build an app for their own city.

How would we finance the awards? We'd crowdsource it on Kickstarter.

How would we get word out? We'd have to crowdsource that, too. (I'm sure we could do that, if we decided it was worthwhile.)

So it would sort of be an un-contest. An apps contest put on not by a mayor, or by the world bank, but by ordinary people, and meeting the needs of the people.

The question that I want you to answer is: is this exciting, here on the cusp of 2011? Are apps contests still relevant? Or are they stale? Are they an effective way to spur innovation?

That's what I can't decide, personally. What do you think?

Note: This is NOT exactly where DIYcity is "thinking about going in 2011", when we talk about where we're going. But it could lead us down the road to that place in a nice way.

More on that soon. I feel like it's time to start playing more of an open hand as I and others think through all of these things.

For now though: please weigh in on this question. You can either reply to this thread, or if you'd rather you can respond to me privately at geraci at gmail dot com.

Thanks!

John

17 Nov18:10

Great Idea - but what about the data

By geddes

Hi John,

I like this idea. Yes, app contents are exciting & relevant. They do spur innovation. However, to work I think they need to be tied to the release of new datasets. I don't know what kind of data the other cities in the t20 provide.

What made the contents in NYC and DC work was that the city governments made an effort to release a lot of data sets. It is what unlocked a lot of innovation.

Without the data sets, app developers will be forced to do lots of annoying things:
- Freedom of Information Act Requests (if they exist in the country in question)
- Screen Scraping
- Crowd Sourcing
- etc.

So perhaps to make this more effective, there can be a dataset component to it as well, like DIY City invites cities to participate, but to do so they need to commit to releasing data. Or maybe DIY City hires a lawyer to support app developer's data requests, or something of that nature.

Thanks,
Geddes

17 Nov18:30

Good points, thanks for making them

By John Geraci

Right, Geddes - good points, thanks for making them.

This gets a bit deeper into the idea than I was going to go in this post.

As a colleague said to me the other day "developers are really bad at locating data sets on their own". So you can't just leave it to them to find their data and hope that good things would arise from that.

But there are others who are good at locating data sets. So you can crowdsource that, too, no? Set up a wiki for data, or something along those lines.

Maybe that becomes part of the contest, in itself.

The other piece here is that there are LOTS of things you can do to make cities work better that don't involve city data at all. And I think that's a big component that gets overlooked when cities run contests themselves, because they have a vested interest in showing off all of the fancy data they've just paid to open up.

So I would focus on those two things: crowdsourcing the location of data, wherever possible, and then drilling down on other datasets, and on non-data-centric solutions as much as possible.

Thanks for the input.

Others?

17 Nov18:48

...I like this idea as well:

By John Geraci

...and I love your idea here as well:

So perhaps to make this more effective, there can be a dataset component to it as well, like DIY City invites cities to participate, but to do so they need to commit to releasing data.

There is a nice opportunity with a contest like this to use it as a tool to help cities around the world to make datasets available publicly.

We would definitely want that to be part of the mix.

18 Nov04:32

Hi guys I think that here in

By marianogoren

Hi guys

I think that here in Argentina, we don´t reached critical mass on smartphone use to expect that people start using the apps.

Nevertheless, here we have excellent developers and designers ready to participate on this kind of contest (we had various this year).

Maybe we should think in a low-fi framework to apply in cities of the third world instead of trying to replicate the same model.

Mariano A. Goren
IxDA Buenos Aires
www.marianogoren.com
www.twitter.com/marianogoren

18 Nov04:47

I was just about to close

By John Geraci

I was just about to close down the computer for the night, but had to write in to say that is an excellent point.

Most of the world is effectively still using web 1.0 and older model cellphones. And there are lot of possible innovations and solutions for cities that can and should make use of those technologies, especially as those are the technologies that can really be inclusive and achieve critical mass.

So maybe we need to be explicit that we mean "apps" in the broader sense of the word, as in application, not necessarily as in simply smart phone apps.

John