NASA will give $35,000 to creative mobile developers for turning open government data into an app to help deal with climate change. The Climate Resilience Data Challenge, which starts on Monday and goes through March, is part of a bigger push by the White House, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey other federal agencies to encourage creative coders and innovators to use the vast amounts of public federal data to build tools to help the country as climate change continues to increase the number and severity of natural disasters like floods, droughts and extreme storms.
“Federal agencies, such as NASA and the USGS, traditionally focus on developing world-class science data to support scientific research, but the rapid growth in the innovation community presents new opportunities to encourage wider usage and application of science data to benefit society,” said Kevin Murphy, NASA program executive for Earth Science Data Systems in a statement. “We need tools that utilize federal data to help our local communities improve climate resilience, protect our ecosystems, and prepare for the effects of climate change.”
The dangers to the ecosystem as the world heats up are very real and can have very scary consequences for our food and water security, not to mention our general safety from hurricanes, tornadoes and other storms. The giant collection of data related to the issue that the government recently opened to the public could be the key for predicting, limiting or perhaps even stopping problems before they begin, but the raw data isn't enough on its own. That's why the contest is turning to "citizen scientists," those who can turn all of that data into apps that can help local communities better handles the problems presented by climate change. What those tools would look like is hard to say, but that's basically the point of the competition.
“Government science follows the strictest professional protocols because scientific objectivity is what the American people expect from us,” said Virginia Burkett, acting USGS associate director for Climate Change and Land Use in a statement. “That systematic approach is fundamental to our mission. With this challenge, however, we are intentionally looking outside the box for transformational ways to apply the data that we have already carefully assembled for the benefit of communities across the nation.”
Using big data to make apps that anyone can use describes a lot of the innovation economy. This is just the same concept applied to climate data and helping people cope with natural disasters rather than marketing or business goals. There are three stages to the contest, which will be based in D.C. It starts with a pitch about the idea, followed by storyboarding what the product will look like and eventually building a prototype of the winning idea.
The contest is a great idea not only for whatever concept wins, but for the tone it sets for people and startups looking for a hot idea. There's so much data out there on climate change that could be transformed into useful and even lucrative data tools, it's nice to have the government encouraging experimentation with it. If you want to start competing in the contest, you can apply online right now and learn a little more about it in the video below.
