The past two years, New York City has hosted contests for mobile apps that use city data. Now New York State’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is launching a similar contest of its own.
A number of cities, including Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, have made their data publicly available. It makes sense: Apps that improve parking situations or make public transportation easier to navigate benefit the city without sucking its resources.
But New York City, and now New York State, are some of the first governments to add a contest to the process in order to incentivize developers to make such apps.
To be eligible for “MTA App Quest” and its $15,000 in cash prizes, the biggest requirement is that apps need to use at least one of the MTA’s data sets.
The MTA first posted databases online for developer use in January 2010, and 40 or so apps have been created using the data. But many of these, like NYC Way [iTunes link], were entries in New York City’s BigApps contest, which borrowed several MTA databases.
For its own contest, the MTA has released six new or updated data sets, including one that shows where platforms, elevators, turnstiles and station agent booths are located inside subway stations.
Beyond that, the two contests are pretty similar, despite one being run by the city and the other by the state. The MTA has partnered with the same contest platform that NYC did, ChallengePost.
In this case, ChallengePost is putting up the prize money for the contest. Usually, it collects money to run crowdsourcing contests for clients like the World Bank and Michelle Obama. ChallengePost CEO Brandon Kessler says that NYC was the first city to use a contest on his platform for an open data app contest.
Now that New York State has also caught on to the publicity method, we wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not the last.
More About: BigApps, MTA, new york, public transportation
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