City, County, State Collaborate on Application Competition, Open Data
Client:
Cook County, City of Chicago, State of Illinois
Practice Area:
Project Year:
2011
Project Description:
In June, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle, and Illinois Governor Pat Quinn jointly announced Apps for Metro Chicago, Illinois (A4MC), a software application development competition. The competition offers more than $50,000 in awards for apps that solve problems and improve services in Metro Chicago.
A4MC is the first competition to arise from a collaboration between four governmental agencies: the City of Chicago, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, Cook County, and the State of Illinois. These agencies are together providing nearly 200 data sets and unprecedented levels of technical assistance for app development.
Virginia Carlson, President of Metro Chicago Information Center, which is hosting and running the competition, said, "This application competition is unprecedented. Nowhere in the country have city, county and state officials coordinated to develop an open data portal for residents and jointly held a competition for application development."
"This competition will allow individuals to interact directly with their government and make a large difference in the way we live in Chicago," said Mayor Emanuel.
President Preckwinkle said, "This competition puts information in the hands of people who can help government operate more transparently and efficiently and make our communities a better place to live."
A4MC is the first step of a collaborative open data effort between the City and County to increase government transparency. This collaborative effort is the result of recommendations laid out in the final report of the Joint Committee on City-County Collaboration, which was developed with support from Civic Consulting and our partners.
IBM Corporation is working with Civic Consulting to support the collaborative open data effort by lowering barriers to accessing and utilizing available data. Civic Consulting is also supporting work on a cross-governmental, regional data portal to be released next year.