And The Winners Are...

Written by: Clay Johnson
Date: 04/20/2009 11:59 a.m.

Judging our first Apps for America contest was difficult: 40+ solid, open source applications that solidly moved the ball forward in terms of opening government and providing new methods of communicating to our legislative branch.

The entries ranged from highly technical Bayesian prediction tools like Words Vote, to the super simple and super useful GovPix. Every entry presented was open source and and amazing commitment on behalf of the development community to open their government. Every single entrant was amazing and I wish we could give prizes to everyone.

But we can't. The rules say there's 1 prize for first place, 1 prize for second place, 4 third place prizes and 10 honorable mentions prizes. Which gives us 16 total prizes to give away.

Scoring was done with our own judging application-- if you could call it that. It was just a lightweight Django application that showed each application in an iframe, and then asked each judge to rate the app according to 5 categories. Later on, I'll run down some interesting stats from the 45 different applications, but for now, I'm sure many of you who've waited and waited want to see who has won.

First Place for $15,000

[Filibusted](http://filibusted.us/): "Hold senators accountable for blocking legislation."

Second Place for $5,000

Legistalker: "The latest online activity of Congress Members."

Third Place for $1,000 (4)

Honorable Mentions for $100 (10)

This was a great start. For those of you who won, congratulations. For those of you who didn't-- thank you for participating. The good news is, you'll have another shot at this soon as this will not be the last of Apps for America. Thanks to all who participated, and we hope you continue to build and support products to open up our government!

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Discussion

Peter Corbett 04/20/2009 12:06 p.m. (permalink)

I had the pleasure of judging this contest and I was incredibly impressed by the quality of work all around. All the developers who participated in this contest deserve great praise for their contribution to our country - as the work they're doing is laying the foundation for a more transparency, efficient and participatory democracy in America.

Congratulation to you all and THANK YOU!
Jim Gilliam 04/20/2009 12:25 p.m. (permalink)

Congrats to Filibusted, they definitely deserved to win... very clever and well executed.
Andrew Cohen 04/20/2009 12:30 p.m. (permalink)

Congrats to all the winners! It would be keen if Sunlight could soon post a few sentences summarizing why each entry was chosen. -Andrew
Tim 04/20/2009 12:48 p.m. (permalink)

Congrats to all the winners.
Carl Meyer 04/20/2009 1:05 p.m. (permalink)

Wow - some really impressive apps there. Going to take me a while to sort through them all and decide which ones to start using...
ben rigby 04/20/2009 1:18 p.m. (permalink)

Really great winners. Can't wait to use them. Congrats all. Thanks for the contest Sunlight. Nice leadership.
Will Riley 04/20/2009 1:25 p.m. (permalink)

The Petition Archives won the Wired.com poll, but did not even receive an honorable mention by the Sunlight Foundation judges. Oh well.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/wiredcom-reader.html
Ari Herzog 04/20/2009 1:37 p.m. (permalink)

Mazel Tov to the winners and the losers. Wait, there are no losers. Everyone's a winner.

Seriously, congrats... and I look forward to hearing about collaborative efforts among all of you.
Chad Goodwin 04/20/2009 6:42 p.m. (permalink)

Looking through all of the winners, there are some great looking sites. Congrats to the winners.
Admin 05/21/2009 4:20 p.m. (permalink)

I am not satisfied with the results.......
Free Credit Help 09/20/2009 2:27 p.m. (permalink)

These open government sites are all great. The one thing i despise is little white lies behind closed doors

What are Your Thoughts?

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