DC Technology Office Welcomes Student Robotics Competition

Today the District of Columbia Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) announced OCTO’s inaugural partnership in the regional FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition for high-school students.

FIRST, founded in 1989, designs accessible, innovative programs to build self-confidence, knowledge, and life skills while motivating young people to pursue opportunities in science, technology, and engineering. In the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), teams of students and their mentors build robots designed to solve a defined problem. Each team has six weeks to build its robot from a standard kit of parts. Then the teams test their robots in challenge matches that measure the effectiveness of each robot, the power of collaboration, and the determination of students.

This year, for the first time, the District of Columbia is hosting the regional FRC competition, scheduled for February 26-28 at the Washington Convention Center. OCTO employees will serve as volunteer mentors to the District teams. District Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Vivek Kundra will sit on the regional judges’ panel and has enlisted local business and community partners to support the regional competition. Winners of the regional competition will compete in the international FIRST Championship on April 16-18 in Atlanta, Georgia.

This year’s competition launched on Saturday, January 3 via an international satellite broadcast on the NASA channel. DC regional competitors and mentors viewed the kickoff from McKinley Technology High School in the District.

“Forty years ago, NASA fueled a generation’s imagination with the success of Apollo 11,” noted FIRST founder Dean Kamen in the kickoff broadcast. “Just as NASA scientists landed a man on the moon and returned him safely to earth in 1969, so too will these young people go on to explore new frontiers and develop breakthrough technologies that will change the world.”

The District will field 15 teams for the 2009 FRC, one from Friendship Public Charter Schools, one from the University of the District of Columbia’s Saturday Academy and 13 from the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS).

The DCPS teams include 200 students divided among five veteran teams that have entered at least one FRC before and eight rookie teams participating for the first time. The five veteran teams are Ballou Senior High School, Bell Multicultural High School, Roosevelt Senior High School, McKinley Technology High School and Francis L. Cardozo Senior High School. The eight rookie teams are School Without Walls High School, Calvin Coolidge Senior High School, Phelps Senior High School, Eastern Senior High School, Wilson Senior High School, Dunbar Pre-Engineering High School, Luke C. Moore Academy High School and Anacostia Senior High School.

District Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra welcomed the District teams to the January 3 kickoff broadcast at McKinley Tech. To cheers from the crowd, he congratulated McKinley Tech for helping lead a far-reaching “technology transformation” in the District’s public schools. Kundra recalled how a similar high school science competition sparked his lifelong fascination with science and math and set him on the path to an exciting technology career. “This competition will help you gain the skills you need to prosper in the global economy. It can really be a life-changing experience, leading to an exciting career in technology,” he said. “The science competition I entered in high school opened up the wonderful world of science, math and technology for me, as I know this competition will for you.”

To learn more about FIRST, visit http://www.usfirst.org/.

Enable Participatory Democracy by Launching Apps for Democracy Contest

Mayor Fenty Announces Winners of Applications for Democracy Contest

Today District of Columbia Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Vivek Kundra announced the winners of the District’s “Applications for Democracy” technology contest. The contest launched on October 14, 2008, invited software developers to compete for the best new applications to make DC government data more accessible and useful for the public.

“My administration is committed to making government more accessible and more transparent, and through this contest we’ve gotten help from the most talented developers,” said Mayor Fenty. “I’m delighted with the responses. With these innovative applications, we can put government literally in the hands of the people.”

The competition, open to the general public, asked developers to create mashup applications (a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool) for the District's data using popular consumer technologies like the iPhone, Facebook, Google Maps and others. Contest entries were required to use open source programming. Entries were judged by an appointed jury based on criteria including usefulness to citizens, usefulness to government and originality.

The District collects and maintains vast stores of data on every aspect of government operations, from government contracts to crime statistics to economic development and much more. The District has already organized and published this data in a real-time data catalog with more than 200 data feeds at http://data.octo.dc.gov/. Applications for Democracy solicited the best and most cost-effective ways to package and present this data for easy viewing, analysis, and repurposing by the public.

“While the immediate goal of the Applications for Democracy contest is to develop innovative software to present District data, its long-term goals are broader,” said District CTO Vivek Kundra. “By making government data easy for everyone to access and use, the District hopes to foster citizen participation in government, drive private-sector technology innovation and growth, and build a new model for government-private sector collaboration that can help all governments address the technology challenges of today and tomorrow.”

The contest attracted more than 25 innovative applications, all licensed as open source and freely available to government and the public. Gold and Silver contest winners include:

Gold Prize Winners:

• Application: DC Historic Tours—a slick Google Maps mashup that combines custom walking tour creation with Flickr photo feeds and Wikipedia entries. Users can click through to create a custom map, save it and reference it later when they’re ready to tour the city.

o Agency—Boalt Interactive

• Application: iLive.at—presents users with information tailored to that exact location, cleanly organized into categories. The “Errands” category indicates how far the nearest shopping center, post office and convenience store are, among other things. “Crime” tabulates recently reported offenses in the area, and “The People” displays colorful pie charts giving demographic information. Users can also click on a category and the relevant items will be plotted on a map of their neighborhood.

o Independent Developers: Travis Hurant, Tim Koelkebeck and Brian Sobel.

Silver Prize Winners (6):

• Application: Park It—an application that allows you to check a specific area in The District for parking information. Allows users to check parking information before leaving the house and to see which streets are available for parking. Users can also check which meters cost money and which are free. Park It DC will even help users find out if they’re parking in a residential parking permit zone!

o Independent Developer: Shaun Farrell

• Application: Where’s My Money, DC?—a forum based Facebook application that encourages users to discuss procurements made by the DC government.

o Independent Developer: Keith Bradner

• Application: DC Crime Finder—Determines the user’s location and will return specific instances of various crimes based on a one-, two- or three-mile radius.

o Independent Developer: Mark Headd

• Application: Stumble Safely—an online application that helps users find the best bars and a safe path to stumble home on.

o Agency: Development Seed

• Application: Point About—a realtime, location-aware DC alerting tool for the iPhone, which includes crime reports, building permits and more.

o Agency: Point About

• Application: We the People—a peer-led community reference website that allows users to edit based on Washington, DC public data. We the People empowers everyone to make DC a more responsive community where all voices are heard and everyone can make a difference. Like Wikipedia, users can link any expression to its definition or another page.

o Agency: Chrys Tarvin

Bronze winners and honorable mentions are listed at appsfordemocracy.org. Votes are also being accepted for the People’s Choice Award.

A full list of submissions can be viewed at appsfordemocracy.org.

District of Columbia Launches Open Innovation Challenge

Today the District of Columbia Chief Technology Office of the Officer (OCTO) announced “Apps for Democracy,” an initiative to develop new software applications to make the DC government’s data more accessible and useful for the general public and the government. Register for the contest at http://apps08.eventbrite.com/.

The District collects and maintains vast stores of data on every aspect of government operations, from government contracts to crime statistics to economic development and much more. The District has already organized and published this data in a real-time data catalog at http://data.octo.dc.gov/. The new initiative will solicit the best and most cost-effective ways to package and present this data for easy viewing, analysis, and repurposing by the public.

Technology developers are invited to compete in creating applications for popular consumer technologies like iPhones, Facebook, Map Mashups and others. Developers must use open source programming.

The contest is open to the general public and will run for a month from October 14 through November 14, 2008. The District will host a kick-off on October 16 and will conduct five open “Innovation Labs” each weekend to help contestants find collaborators. The contest will conclude on November 13 with an awards ceremony to unveil the winning applications. Additional contest details and guidelines for entries can be found at http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/.

The contest will serve as a catalyst to visualize the District’s data so it will be useful to the citizens of DC, improving their quality of life; foster innovation in the DC technology community resulting in startup formation and growth; solve the technology challenges of OCTO through more cost effective open collaboration; and work towards a new model for government/private sector cross collaboration that can be utilized repeatedly to solve our challenges and serve as an example for other governments.

“The Apps for Democracy contest is part of our drive toward digital democracy in the nation’s capital,” said District CTO Vivek Kundra. “Especially in these difficult economic times, it’s crucial to the government’s mission to find more efficient and impactful methods for delivering an even higher level of service for a fraction of the cost. We are ushering in a new age of participatory democracy, one in which technology is developed by the people for the people.”