We are proud to collaborate once again with our friends from the Open Data community in China and announce our strategic partnership with the Shanghai Open Data Apps. Open data being a topic we particularly care for, we are delighted to be able to present and promote this initiative to our community, giving them the chance to take part to the challenge.
Feng Gao, editorial board member and speaker at Lift China, initially got involved as a member of the organizing board. This year, the board members established a new social enterprise to operate the challenge and he stepped up as the CEO.
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"SODA is a mean to stimulate the consumption of open data, unlock the supply of data from government and companies to establish an experimental space for data innovation on urban issues."
Feng Gao
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SODA is the first open data challenge and community in China looking at supporting innovation through open data, a topic that we particularly care for.
After a first edition focusing on transportation data, the second edition looks at fostering new creative solutions for a safer city ranging from food inspection results to smartcards transaction data or public safety. The Shanghai government is making accessible over 30 dataset (worth 2TB of data) available from its different commissions and administrations.
Opening the access to data is a great challenge for governments around the world, it is particularly interesting to understand why the Shanghai government wants to see more applications developed based upon their open data.
The Chinese national government released a mandate in 2015 to accelerate the development of big data. And one of key project is opening up data. Open data is somehow trending in china but just not every government understand why they should do it and what’s the value created by SODA.
SODA is a mean to stimulate the consumption of open data, unlock the supply of data from government and companies to establish an experimental space for data innovation on urban issues. It becomes both a perfect example and incentive for those governments to push the release and use of those data sets. The reaction from the public was enthusiastic as it is the first channel in China that allows anyone to access and obtain high-value data to develop new products and services that address urban issues.
Compared to the first edition, both the amount of data available and the cash prizes have been increased. The goal is to provide enough cash prize to be used as seed funding, enabling the participating teams to further develop their ideas and projects.
Currently, a jury is reviewing all the ideas submitted to select the 100 best teams that will be able to develop the prototype of their ideas. More informations are available on the SODA website and we can’t wait to share with you more informations about our collaboration with them in the near future.
Stay tuned!
