$10,000 Prize For Connecting Businesses With Government Data 45
First time accepted submitter InsertCleverUsername writes "The Department of Commerce has announced a $10,000 contest for developers making apps to utilize Commerce and other publicly available data and information to support American businesses. Developers must use at least one Department of Commerce dataset to create an application that assists businesses and/or improves the service delivery of Business.USA.gov to the business community. Developers may choose any platform. A list of developer-friendly data sets can be found on the Business Data and Tools page of Data.gov."
Woohoo $10,000 (Score:3, Insightful)
Web services (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't they be further ahead to just publish their data as simple web services as a starting point? I see that some already seem to be, but many are just CSV files, zip files, etc . You never know when new data is available, or there's corrections, etc. It's also a little surprising that the number of downloads for the first file I tried was zero.
Re:Woohoo $10,000 (Score:4, Insightful)
Shows what PHB's want to pay for software. (Score:4, Insightful)
6. Intellectual Property Rights: All submissions to the DOC Business Apps Challenge remain the intellectual property of the individuals or organizations that developed them. By registering, consenting to the terms of the challenge, and entering a Submission, however, the Participant agrees that DOC reserves an irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free license to use, copy, distribute to the public, create derivative works from, and publicly display and perform a Submission for a period of one year starting on the date of the announcement of contest winners.
So, for $10k they get bunches of apps which can be distributed royalty-free for a year. If an app is popular, they can change the labels (create derivative works) and continue on. Only 3 developers get any money. Everyone else may have their their app distributed with no compensation.
If you plan on paying off loans or feeding your family by developing software, you should avoid these contests. Leave the submissions to the 9th grade web design classes.
Trusting gov for data access is a bad, bad idea (Score:1, Insightful)
Note: I understand the anecdotal nature of this comment. The problematic, US Government (USG) employees (mentally retired but still obstructing progress) are what we call "institutionalized."
This program, to pay people to develop apps based USG data sets and applications, is not a good idea.
USG cannot and will not guarantee access-to nor permanence-of data and applications.
Engineering firms used data sets and applications via analog or digital files for years. Engineers and firms swapped their copies of data and some programs.
USG decided it would 'help'. USG adopted data sets and applications and hosted them.
Organizations built applications based upon USG-hosted data. Organizations built applications based upon applications built upon USG data.
After a few iterations of Federal employees and administration changes, unilaterally, USG personnel decided either it cost too much to host the data or no one used the data or no one should be allowed to access to the data, and, USG cut off the data and applications. (USG employees exacerbated the problem when they declared public domain data to be proprietary property of USG. "We're not sharing, and, it's illegal for you to share!")
Suddenly, applications around the world crashed. The underlying software crashed because USG-hosted data was inaccessible. The meta software crashed because underlying software crashed.
Users revolted against USG.
USG relented a little. Some data and apps became available - if you applied for access and a USG employee's arbitrary decision deemed you worthy.
However, realizing the unreliability of politicians in charge of data, applications, science, and 'approval', engineers returned to swapping their copies of data and programs.
Trusting USG to guarantee access and permanence of data is a bad idea.
This program, to pay people to develop apps based upon probably transient and spurious USG data sets and applications, is a bad, bad idea.
An independent-host or revolving-host escrow repository of data and source code could be more reliable.
When someone says, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.", grab you data and source code and RUN!
Re:Shows what PHB's want to pay for software. (Score:2, Insightful)
However, If you wish to make a name for yourself and can create a high quality application that is adopted by the federal government...
I think you'd be showing future employers (or venture(vulture) capitalists) that you have the ability to create stellar applications.
Sometimes doing something for advertising is more important than for the pure profit. Comments like yours never seem to take that into account