The Civic Apps Competition Handbook

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

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.