This guest post was written by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was elected to the position in 2003 and reelected in 2007. Newsom is also running for governor of California in the upcoming 2010 election. In this guest post, Mayor Newsom announces a contest to create apps using city data from DataSF.org,.
Last week, we announced a City App Store to highlight and centralize software applications developed from government data available on DataSF.org. The response from the community has been overwhelming.
We have received a number of new civic apps that are now featured in the DataSF App Showcase. We’ve added Mom Maps, a new iPhone app that helps you find kid friendly locations in San Francisco, Dadnab a text messaging service that gives you transit directions, and then there’s EveryBlock, which has just added a new feature. The site breaks down what types of services people are requesting from the city by neighborhood, zip code and day.
This type of innovation is exactly what we were hoping for when we launched DataSF.org less than six weeks ago.
We were not sure what people would create with the data, but we knew that many of our talented developers wanted to help improve San Francisco. Now, our community is coming together to help fill our app store with even more civic apps.
The Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch reporting team, Spot.Us, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, MAPLight.org, the Gov 2.0 Summit, Sun Light Foundation and others are announcing today that they are joining forces to sponsor the first DataSF App Contest on Nov. 7.
The day-long app-building contest is open to developers, journalists, community organizers, policy wonks, students and others interested in building a better San Francisco from more than 100 datasets available on DataSF.org.
Register here for the DataSF App Contest. If you are interesting in sponsoring the App Contest, visit the Spot.Us page
A team of judges will pick the winning app at the end of the day and award a cash prize or Apple gift certificate to the winning team. More than $1600 has already been raised from community sponsors. If you would like to donate to the contest please click here.
We are excited to see what apps will be created from this contest. The only limit is participants’ imagination and the amount of data we are able to make available by Nov. 7. In San Francisco we are moving away from a one size fits all government to making government a platform for innovation.
If you are using or have created an application based on City data that is not in our DataSF App Showcase, we would like to hear from you.
Join Mayor Newsom on Facebook or follow him on Twitter.
An app to know when you boss is banging your wife, even if you got him that job.
That’s a ridiculous idea, it would never pass Apple’s app approval process.
And yet they let scumbags like that become mayor. Go figure.
Mom Maps will be used by pervs just as much as moms. Immoral people will never take responsibility for such careless decisions. That is why newsome is such a failure. California should reject such selfish nonsense.
Or an app that lets me know if there is a booty call nearby! LOL
Jim,
Whether we like it or not, what will you do in regards to same-sex marriage marriage if you are elected Governor of California?
He’s here to promote app development. Go troll somewhere else.
Hopefully do what the voters of California have voted in the majority THREE TIMES!!
i wonder if he even reads these guest posts.
I guess we shall see.
Go away troll.
Actually, YOU’re the troll: http://www.sfga...BAGM3NSFGQ7.DTL
He didn’t write them, why should he read them?
Jim:
I want to organize what SF reads on http://www.readinglogs.com!
I like this guy’s style.
What style is that? The cheating on his best friends wife or willfully going against the constituents of his state.
More troll posts.
“willfully going against the constituents of his state”
WTF are you talking about?
LAW: Pay no attention to Charley, he is just a troll looking to start an argument.
He’s referring to newsom trying to push through prop8 against everyone’s will.
We’ve been playing around with mapping lots of the DataSF geographic data (crime, calls for service, etc). One of these visualizations is of crime data that finds drug dealing offenses (specifically crack, heroin, and meth) that occur during school hours within 1,000 feet of schools in the city. Check out the video in the blog post to see how we filtered down the data:
http://blog.spa...n-safe-schools/
Can non-residents participate? I am from Boston.
Never mind. I am not gonna fly down to SFO for the contest!
@Beantown: Non-residents can participate in the web app contest/hackathon – but yea, you need to be here on the day of it. More details to come.
Nice to see the “Apps for Democracy” contest http://www.apps...rdemocracy.org/ that the DC Government (Office of the Chief Technology Officer) pioneered last year being replicated in other cities. Congratulations to @corbett3000 and #istrategylabs for demonstrating the initial value of such efforts. Congratulations to all those who are taking the concept and building on it.
Thanks for the shout, Matt!
SF and NYC are both running app dev contests this fall.
Here’s your mission: Make what we did in DC look 1.0. Seriously. If you do – you’ll be pushing this ‘citizen driven innovation’ thing forward faster than ever.
FYI, the contest part is the easy part – the ‘getting the data’ part is the hard one…so big props to SF, NYC, DC and all other governments making the effort to open their data.
There’s an app in the store now that gives you all the health inspector ratings for San Francisco Restaurants, “Clean Eats”. What are the terms for people that have already created an app? There’s a quite a few San Fran targeted apps in there. – Tom
Too bad that *useful* data, like the current position of MUNI buses and trains, their arrival times at the nearest stops, etc. are still not available on this DataSF site. This is data that people would use on a daily basis; it is the city’s property, but the cityzens don’t have access to it because MUNI sold the rights to it to a third party.
This site reminds me of the old adage: all sizzle, no steak. Gavin likes to talk big, but delivers small.
Can’t you just access all that information using NextMuni (http://www.nextmuni.com)?
They have a mobile-friendly version of the site and it’s relatively accurate.