πŸ“• Node [[2010 03 25 bc apps for climate action announcement]]
πŸ“„ 2010-03-25-bc-apps-for-climate-action-announcement.md by @bmann


layout: post title: BC Apps for Climate Action Announcement created: 1269581625 categories: - Vancouver tags: - BC - climate change - contest - John Yap - David Eaves - Globe 2010 - FTW - Make Web Not War - open data - Canada


I'll be at the press announcement tomorrow where the BC Apps for Climate Change contest is announced. From the invite:
	<span lang="en-ca"><font face="Courier New" size="2">Join <a href="http://www.gov.bc.ca/env/climate_action.html">Minister of State for Climate Action John Yap</a> to see</font></span><span lang="en-ca">&nbsp;<font face="Courier New" size="2">how the Province is challenging the software community to find new ways</font></span><span lang="en-ca">&nbsp;<font face="Courier New" size="2">to tackle climate change using the world of online and mobile apps.</font></span>
David Eaves has <a href="http://eaves.ca/2010/03/23/bc-apps-for-climate-change-contest-to-be-announced/">some more background information available</a>.

Interestingly, Microsoft is also running an apps contest as part of their &quot;For the Web&quot; FTW coding competition. For that contest, the <a href="http://www.webnotwar.ca/terms-conditions/">terms and conditions</a> include requirements to host on some form of Windows or Azure hosting, but they are also trying to push some open government data.

I have hopes that the province contest uses some standard app contest platform (the one I&#39;ve seen recently is <a href="http://challengepost.com">ChallengePost</a>), but somehow I doubt it.

I&#39;ll be posting updates as I get them. Not sure if I&#39;ll be able to ask questions, but leave comments if there is anything particular you&#39;re interested in and I&#39;ll see what info I can get.
Updates to start after 9:30am, Friday March 26th. Follow hashtag <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&amp;tag=bcapps4climatechange">#bcapps4climatechange</a>.

Here is the video I took of of the announcement:

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<a href="http://vimeo.com/10465076">BC Apps 4 Climate Action</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/bmann">Boris Mann</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.

The announcement was pretty bare bones. Apparently, <a href="http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/media_gallery.asp?media_category_id=20&amp;pageId=65&amp;featureId=11#tag">Prime Minister Harper being on Youtube</a> is a sign of the times, and so the province is jumping on this bandwagon.

The contest site is at&nbsp;<a href="http://apps4climateaction.gov.bc.ca/" style="color: rgb(45, 118, 158); ">apps4climateaction.gov.bc.ca</a>&nbsp;and has all of the details. The contest &quot;launched&quot; today, but submissions don&#39;t start until April 19th.

The $40K in prizes translates to 5 categories with a top prize of only $3K. The comment from Minister Yap about software developers doing it for their &quot;professional pride&quot; underscores the lack of understanding here. In contrast, the <a href="http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/">Apps for Democracy</a> (a contest for only one city, as opposed to an entire province), had a top prize of $16K.

I asked a question about the license of the data. Looking at the <a href="http://apps4climateaction.gov.bc.ca/contest_rules.aspx#entry">contest rules</a>, it&#39;s not &quot;open data&quot;, it&#39;s a 1 year license to use the data. Ouch, there&#39;s another big problem.

The data catalogue of &quot;over 500 sets of data&quot; appears to actually be up now at <a href="http://data.gov.bc.ca/data.html">data.gov.bc.ca</a>. There is no indication of the license of the data on the site, and downloaded data doesn&#39;t include license info either.

There are a number of corporate sponsors (which I can&#39;t link to, they just rotate in the footer of the contest site) - Microsoft and SAP being the gold sponsors, Telus and Eaves.ca being silver sponsors. I hadn&#39;t realized that David was an actual sponsor.

The actual rules for qualifying are very light - you have to use at least one of the provided datasets, and you have to &quot;raise awareness of climate change and climate action issues by making the Data more accessible and understandable to the general public&quot;.

There seem to be a lot of details that still remain to be worked out. The license of the data itself is the big one for me - the whole point of open data is the license under which it is offered. On the other hand, you grant the Province a full license to your application, including the ability to &quot;distribute&quot; it, for an entire year.

Expect some more thoughts / links on this as I find out more information and provide feedback to the folks running this contest.

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