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American Energy Data Challenge

by ceworthington on 11/7/13, 8:35 PM with 24 comments

  • by nostromo on 11/7/13, 9:54 PM

    First thought: omg awesome!

    Second thought: wait, is this just an essay contest?

  • by kylelibra on 11/7/13, 9:11 PM

    Getting paid for an idea? It's every MBAs dream come true!

  • by ceworthington on 11/7/13, 11:00 PM

    This is the first of four contests that will run throughout the coming year. Contest #2, scheduled for Jan - March, is going to ask for functioning apps / prototypes that address an idea surfaced in part #1 (with larger prizes). Contest #3 will be a design and visualization challenge.

    The goal was to engage a broad community (read: MBAs :-) ... but also energy professionals/researchers that can't necessarily code). But we're hoping to fire up the dev/designer community in Contests #2-4. We've already seen some awesome ideas submitted, so we're hoping this model works well.

    Source: I'm currently an Innovation Fellow detailed to the Department of Energy working on Open Data. Hope you all submit an idea!

  • by powertower on 11/7/13, 10:48 PM

    Seriously, even if no real or scalable solutions are ever provided, the government should hand out 10s of 1000s of business challenges and prizes every year... By having every government department list it's internal data and issues.

    Your job would be to improve the processes, and/or solve the issues.

    It wouldn't cost that much (the price of healthcare.gov website + a couple of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters), and would gear the nation towards entrepreneurship, a specialists workforce (not a replaceable unit workforce), and growth of startups.

    And it would make the gov seem more rational and human.

  • by smithzvk on 11/8/13, 12:37 AM

    I like how a 24 character password is automatically insecure, while a 16 character one is not... dumb password validation...

  • by Ixiaus on 11/8/13, 2:31 AM

    The company I work for, http://energycurb.com, has a home energy analytics product that might be able to compete in this.

    We aren't doing anything with public data but this is giving me some good ideas.

  • by jebblue on 11/8/13, 3:57 AM

    Nice idea but the pay isn't high enough to get my ideas.

  • by mrcactu5 on 11/8/13, 4:28 AM

    interesting older guy in the youtube video

  • by jsnk on 11/8/13, 1:48 AM

    "The Contest is open only to: (a) citizens or permanent residents of the United States"

    If you are a foreign hacker in US on TN or H1B or something like that, don't bother.

  • by gavingmiller on 11/7/13, 9:24 PM

    Hijacking the topic - I'm co-founder of a startup called PetroFeed[1] that's building a GitHub-esque platform for the Oil & Gas industry. We've raised $3.1M, have 7 team members currently, and are moving out of closed beta by the end of the week. If you're a Rails dev interested in this area, I'd love to chat with you!

    [1] https://www.petrofeed.com/company/careers