Introducing the Analyze Boston Open Data Challenge

IV. Additional details

I. Picking a Project

Open Data Challenge participants will come up with projects that fit into one of the five challenge tracks:

• Track 1: Reducing Boston’s Carbon Footprint: Participants will use the Boston Energy Reporting and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO), City of Boston Utility Billing Data, real-time electricity usage data, and other relevant datasets from Analyze Boston to find new ways to promote energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Boston. You might (for example) analyze the efficiency of individual buildings relative to their characteristics and usage, develop a new map to highlight Boston's greenest buildings, or create graphs of usage over time to see how Boston's demand for energy is evolving over time.

• Track 2: Making Open Data Local: Participants will develop tools to help the City’s Office of Neighborhood Services and other local organizations to better understand neighborhood-level patterns in Boston’s data and share this information to residents and community leaders. This could involve creating a neighborhood-specific view of infomation from different Analyze Boston datasets, an easy-to-use mapping tool for non-technical users, a customizable dashboard so users can track their own particular metrics, or anything else that would users to better connect the city's data to life in their communities.

• Track 3: Learning More from BuildBPS Data: Participants will use data collected by Boston Public Schools in producing BuildBPS, its 10-year plan for modernizing school infrastructure, to create new analysis tools and data visualizations that offer insight into the conditions of school buildings and educational environments. These tools will be used alongside the existing BuildBPS Dashboard in their Neighborhood Workshops series later this spring, helping parents, students, and the rest of the community to come up with innovative ideas to guide BPS as they plan for the future.

• Track 4: Identifying Fire Risks: Participants will use Fire Incident Reporting, Code Enforcement, and other datasets from Analyze Boston to develop ways for the Boston Fire Department, Inspectional Services Department, and other City agencies to identify locations at high risk for fires and other dangerous events. Inspired by similar projects in other cities (summarized in a report last month from Harvard's Ash Center), the goal is to enable the City to better direct its preventive outreach efforts (including safety inspections, smoke and carbon monoxide detector installation, and fire safety education) to address these hazards before they turn into tragedies.

• Track 5: Telling a Story Through Data: Participants will pick an event or series of events from the past few years (the snowstorms of early 2015, for example, or the Patriots’ 2017 win) and find relevant datasets (street plowing requests, say, or noise complaints) that help show the impact of those events on the city and its residents. These stories will help us to educate the community about how the data we collect and share through Analyze Boston relates to their everyday lives.

These tracks were chosen first and foremost because the projects they lead to could help to solve real-world challenges and make life better for the people of Boston. Three of these tracks are based on specific requests from our colleagues in other departments and organizations, and for those datasets, you can click on the titles to hear directly from those stakeholders how your projects can best address their needs. The other two tracks were chosen by members of Boston's Analytics Team as ways that participants could help bring new ideas and insights into the work we do with partners all across the city.

The five challenge tracks also give participants a variety of topics, datasets, and approaches to choose from, and offer ways for people with a wide range of skillsets and specialties to work on projects that are a good fit for their own abilities. Beyond what’s specified in the list of tracks above, projects can take any form that participants choose, and we encourage creativity! You can perform an analysis, design a map or graph, build a predictive model, create a dashboard, develop an application, or do anything else you can think of that uses data from Analyze Boston.

Participants may work individually or in teams of up to ten participants. Each individual participant can be involved in up to three projects at most, and only one project per challenge track.

II. Submitting, developing, and Presenting Your Project

You can do your project however you wish, using any software or platform you like. When you submit your project, however, we want you to share your code, results, and other outputs in a publicly accessible location. When the project is complete, you can submit everything at this link. We will then make these submissions available to the public during and after the showcase event on May 6th.

If you want to present your project at the showcase event, you’ll want to submit a separate application using this link ahead of time. You don’t need to finish your project before applying, but you should have a good idea of what you’re going to do. That’ll help us to figure out the best place to fit your presentation into the day’s schedule.

While we can’t guarantee a presentation slot for everyone who applies, we’re going to try and accommodate as many as we can. Only presenters who submit their completed project by the submission deadline will be confirmed for the showcase event.

III. Logistics

Open Data Challenge Schedule

• Challenge kickoff: April 6th at 7pm

• Showcase presentation application deadline: April 24th at noon EXTENDED to April 28th at noon!

• Project submission deadline: May 1st at noon

• Showcase event final schedule released: May 3rd

• Showcase event: May 6th

The Showcase Event and Awards

The Analyze Boston Open Data Challenge will culminate in our Showcase Event on May 6th at District Hall (75 Northern Ave, in the Seaport). This is a free event where attendees will learn more about Analyze Boston and then see what challenge participants came up with. There will also be instructional sessions where attendees can learn more about tools and techniques they can use to do even more with open data.

The event will finish with the announcement of awards for Open Data Challenge winners. There will be three sets of awards given out:

• Challenge Track Awards: Winners and runners-up will be chosen for each of the challenge tracks above by a panel of expert judges.

• Special Prizes: Judges will also pick winners for best student project, best project from someone new to data, best project built on open source software, and best project using maps or geospatial analysis.

• Grand Prizes: An overall Grand Prize winner and runner-up will be chosen by audience vote.

All winners will be awarded prizes donated by our Open Data Challenge partners. These prizes include:

• Amazon Echos (courtesy of Qlarion)
• Amazon Kindle Paperwhites (courtesy of Amazon Web Services)
• Admission to this summer's Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference (courtesy of AppGeo)
• Passes to General Assembly's all-day and evening workshop classes on data and technology (courtesy of General Assembly)
• Open Table restaurant gift cards (courtesy of data.world)
• Access to Data Society's online data science training program (courtesy of Data Society)
• An Oculus Rift VR Headset (courtesy of OpenGov)

IV. Additional details

Tips for Successful Projects

• Find a topic that interests you, and choose an approach makes the most of your unique skills and knowledge. Participating in the challenge should be fun, so we’ve tried to give participants a wide range of options, and the best projects are ones where their creators are able to bring original perspectives or skills to their work.

• Don’t be afraid to try something new! This is a great opportunity to develop new skills and experiment with new topics or techniques, and the result will almost certainly be better than if you just stick to the things you already know. And if you have an idea that you can’t accomplish all on your own, find a teammate with different skills to collaborate with.

• Start simple, then build from there. Don’t try to do a really complex project all at once. Instead, figure out the simplest version of that project that would be interesting, then add on other features afterward if you have time. That way, you won’t feel rushed to finish something for the deadline, and you can always add more to the project after the challenge is over.

• Think about how your project could be used by others. Great open data projects aren’t just interesting, they’re also useful. When choosing what to do, think about the audience for the information your project produces and how they will use it. If your projects helps to identify problems, for example, how would it be useful to somebody trying to solve them? That will help you to focus your project on what’s most important.

• Keep track of what you've done along the way. For a project you're going to share with the public, it's just as important to explain what you've done as it is to show the results. Not only will this help your audience to understand your work, but it will make it much easier for others to take what you've done and build on it in the future. Tools like Jupyter notebooks can really help with this, allowing you to make notes as you go explaining what you're doing and why.

• For data with a geographic component, the Street Address management (SAM) dataset can help to bring in other geographic descriptors (such as latitude/longtitude, neighborhood, or parcel ID).

• Remember that open data is always a work in progress. The data on Analyze Boston is meant to reflect as closely as possible the data that's in the source systems, and like all real-world datasets, it's not always clean. We've made the choice to present datasets as they are (imperfections and all) to help us spot things that need improvement, and over time we're working to get problems we see resolved at the source. In the meantime, you may indeed come across issues in the datasets you're using. For this challenge, we ask that you do the best you can with what's available now, and if you report what you find through our feedback form we'll be sure to add it to our to-do list for the coming months as we continue to refine the site and its content.

Open Data Challenge Partners

The Analyze Boston team wants to thank the following organizations for their support in making our Open Data Challenge a success:

• Amazon Web Services

• AppGeo

• Continuum Analytics

• Data Society

• data.world

• District Hall

• ESRI

• General Assembly

• The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

• OpenGov

• Qlarion

• SAP

• Tableau

• Talla

• TCB Analytics

• Trillium Technical Staffing

Acknowledgements and rules

• Analyze Boston is designed and managed by the City of Boston’s Analytics Team, part of the Department of Innovation and Technology, and funded in part by a generous grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Analyze Boston Open Data Challenge is being organized in collaboration with the partners listed above.

• Everyone is welcome to participate in the challenge, but the event organizers and their employees and contractors are not eligible to receive awards or prizes.

• Prizes will be awarded to the winners directly by event partners. The City of Boston is not involved in this process and is unable to intervene in the event of a dispute. Prize descriptions provided here are based on initial pledges from partners and are subject to change at any time.

• The rules and details of the Open Data Challenge are subject to change at any time at the sole discretion of the organizers.