European public bodies produce thousands upon thousands of datasets every year - about everything from how our tax money is spent to the quality of the air we breathe.  The Open Data Challenge We are challenging designers, developers, journalists, companies, researchers and others to people to come up with something useful, valuable or interesting for European citizens, built using open data. The main goal is developping an 'app' reusing open data from any European public organisation. 20 000 Euro in prize money to be won in the Open Data Challenge.

On the Open Data Challenge doesn’t  matter if you aren’t a computer geek. There’s a section of the competition called ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if...?’, which  allows anyone to submit an idea for how to reuse public data.  There are four main strands to the competition:

•  Ideas – Anyone can suggest an idea for projects which reuse public information to do something interesting or useful.
•  Apps – Teams of developers can submit working applications which reuse public information.
•  Visualisations – Designers, artists and others can submit interesting or insightful visual representations of public information.
•  Datasets - Public bodies can submit newly opened up datasets, or developers can submit derived datasets which they've cleaned up, or linked together.

Judges for the competition include Vice-President of the European Commission and commissioner for Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web and Transparency and Open Data Adviser to the UK government and the professor Nigel Shadboldt who sits on the UK government’s Public Sector Transparency Board.

Euroalert fully supports this initiative and encourages all citizens to participate and all european public bodies to release and unlock new useful data which would serve to enable citizens to make better choices in their daily lives and companies to generate wealth through the creation of new innovative services.

The winners will be announced next June in the European Digital Assembly which will take place in Brussels. The Open Data Challenge is organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Data Forum and Share-PSI in the framework of Big Idea from Digital Agenda for Europe: "Beyond raw data: public sector information, done well", which is supported by W3C and ETSI.