(This post originally appears on the aidinfo website)
Competitions have been a constant feature of the open data movement.
From the early days of the UK government’s Show Us a Better Way challenge to the World Bank’s recent Apps for Developmentcontest, the model of these competitions has evolved with the availability data and we’re starting to see some online platforms that help to commoditise the tools and processes involved.
Most open government data competitions now look something like: “here is some data; here are the rules; these are the prizes; do something neat” Outside of open government data, there are plenty of examples of data problems that have been solved by making the data public and letting a subtle combination of incentives and game mechanics do the rest – see the Netflix Prize for a good example.
With this in mind, I’ve come across 3 interesting, slightly different platforms:
ChallengePost
As a “Marketplace for Challenges” ChallengePost invites users to “Find, Solve and Post” challenges. The World Bank’s Apps for Development contest is running on the ChallengePost platform as are several other corporate and governmental contests. The site incorporates a “social leader board” and allows others to pledge support (money or just appreciation) for a particular contest.
Kaggle
Kaggle describes itself as a “a platform for data prediction competitions that allows organizations to post their data and have it scrutinized by the world’s best data scientists.” and supports two competition types: predicting the past and predicting the future. The team behind it have a finance background but the platform seems reasonably suited to any statistical / analytical work.
Hypios
On hypios.com you’re using their “secure marketplace that facilitates problem solving by connecting Seekers to a global community of Solvers”. In contrast to the two platforms mentioned above, there’s much less open data here – it’s more about letting organisations securely outsource research problems, plenty of which are data-driven.
So what’s this got to do with international development?
Earlier in October Robert Zoellick described the Bank’s Open Data, Open Knowledge and Open Solutions initiative. This kind of thinking needs to be more deeply embedded in the world of foreign aid. Although only part of the Bank’s initiative – I think using data competitions was initially worth it for international development organisations wanting to get people interested in their data.
Right now, I generally think that small, specific contests are worthwhile. However, the overhead of curating data, running, promoting and supporting a large contest should be spent on developing capacity and long-term relationships with the already willing people who want to use newly available data that’s emerging as a result of programmes like the International Aid Transparency Initiative.
I think the online platforms described above can help organisations design and promote specific challenges with less effort and to build valuable external relationships. I would love to hear about any more.
