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!
Discussion
What are Your Thoughts?
Have thoughts that might fuel this discussion further, post them below. (Markdown syntax is supported in comments.)
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!
Congrats to Filibusted, they definitely deserved to win... very clever and well executed.
Congrats to all the winners! It would be keen if Sunlight could soon post a few sentences summarizing why each entry was chosen. -Andrew
Congrats to all the winners.
Wow - some really impressive apps there. Going to take me a while to sort through them all and decide which ones to start using...
Really great winners. Can't wait to use them. Congrats all. Thanks for the contest Sunlight. Nice leadership.
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
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.
Looking through all of the winners, there are some great looking sites. Congrats to the winners.
I am not satisfied with the results.......
These open government sites are all great. The one thing i despise is little white lies behind closed doors