ILOpen Tech Challenge sparking tech-based solutions to community challenges - Metropolitan Planning Council

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ILOpen Tech Challenge sparking tech-based solutions to community challenges

Develop your idea, form your team, and submit by March 15, 2013

The Illinois Open Technology Challenge (ILOpenTech) is bringing governments, developers, and communities together to use public data to create digital tools that serve civic needs and promote economic development—and one of its four pilot communities is the South Suburbs of Chicago. 

The goal of ILOpenTech is "to help develop a real community where we will see sustainable civic results and developers will prosper." To get there, ILOpenTech is helping make Illinois’ open data platform, Data.Illinois.Gov, available statewide, and hosting government trainings, community meetings, and hackathons that bring together technology developers with civic-minded folks and organizations. 

And what's that we said about a contest? Some $75,000 in total prize money is available to individuals or teams that develop software applications using open government data to address the challenges in one of the pilot communities: Belleville, Champaign, Rockford and, yes, the South Suburbs of Chicago via the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association (SSMMA).

Since we know many of our readers are in the Chicago region, here's a bit more detail on what SSMMA hopes the challenge will do for the South Suburbs: 

By being involved with ILOpenTech, SSMMA hopes to see the creation of innovative applications that will interpret the data to help municipalities across the region. The SSMMA has already uploaded over 400 datasets to their South Suburban Atlas GIS consortium, and would like to see  that data used to create interactive application that would help to rank and organize available land sites for developers and businesses looking to build in the area.

We're all for that! So if you're a developer and you are interested in helping out your region, consider meeting the South Suburbs' challenge! Submissions will be accepted until 11:59PM on Friday, March 15, 2013. Here are the complete rules for the challenge

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