Civic Apps Competition Handbook

A Guide to Planning, Organizing, and Troubleshooting

Organize a Civic Apps Competition (CAC) in your city. This practical guide provides best practices for each phase of the process, based largely on the authors’ firsthand experience planning and managing Apps for Metro Chicago (A4MC). You’ll learn everything from setting goals and creating a budget to running the competition and measuring the outcome.

CACs provide software programmers with platforms for building effective apps, using open government data as a way to foster community involvement and make government more transparent. This handbook helps you address serious questions about the process and shows you what’s required for making your competition successful.

• Gain insights from the authors’ survey of 15 CACs in the US and Canada
• Get guidelines for establishing specific goals, and evaluate results with reliable metrics
• Understand major costs involved and build a budget around partners and sponsors
• Determine participation incentives, prize categories, and judging
• Avoid unstructured data sets by being selective when choosing public datasets
• Learn how the authors handled roadblocks during the A4MC competition
• Discover ways to sustain lasting community interest once the CAC is over