9 Year Old and 8 Year Old Create Cross-Continent Mobile App in 5 Minutes!
Data Days 2014, a three-day global conference on Open DataBy opening up data and making it sharable and reusable, governments can enable informed debate, better decision making, and the development of innovative new services. Technical specifications: Polici..., Open Innovation and Open Government just came to an end on Wednesday evening.
Central to the event was the award ceremony for an App competition organised by Citadel on the Move, the European ‘Smart City’ flagship project, and the Linked Organisation of Local Authorities. The competition was set on rewarding creative projects using open data and templates provided by the Citadel Platform.
The winners are… William Colglazier, age 9, and Alexander Glidden, age 8, for their new mobile App @Me-on-the-Move! They both were awarded a ‘Global Entrepreneur Award’ by the Flemish ICT Minister Geert Bourgeois and UN eGovernment Advisor Richard Kerby for their ground-breaking app working in cities across Europe, North America and Africa.
When asked about his app, William explained that the hardest part was actually getting the data: ‘When I first asked for Open Data at my Town Hall the lady really didn’t understand what I was talking about.’, he said. William and Alex approached public administrators in York, Maine and Holyoke, Massachusetts USA and Cape Town, South Africa to ask for data about upcoming events in the cities. ‘I had to keep repeating that I needed the data in an excel spreadsheet,’ Alex commented, ‘because the person I was talking to kept telling me to go to the website.’
The boys used guidelines created by Citadel-on-the-Move to help the public administrators they spoke with to understand what Open Data is all about, and how valuable it can be to their cities. After weeks of going back and forth until they finally got the data they needed in the format they needed, the boys were then able to use the tools created by Citadel-on-the-Move to create a mobile App that combines data from York, Holyoke and Cape Town with data provided by Citadel partner cities Athens, Greece and Gent, Belgium.
William and Alex’s achievement underlines the difficulties that still exist in open access and open reuse of public data, but it mostly points out the tremendous potential of Open Data for bottom-up innovation and the shift towards more ‘user-centred’ public services. ‘These young entrepreneurs hold the future in their hands’ said Gerald Santucci, Head of Unit ‘Knowledge Sharing’ at DG Connect in the European Commission. ‘Citadel on the Move is helping talented young people like William and Alex bring technology to serve mankind.’ he continued.
Rewarding William and Alex was a great victory for the Citadel on the Move project, as Geert Mareels, ICT Manager for the Flemish eGovernment Authority and Citadel Project Coordinator, explained: ‘Citadel-on-the-Move set out to make it easier for people to use open data to create applications that would work across city borders. We never dreamed that our tools would enable a 9 year old to create an app that works across 3 continents. Let alone in 5 minutes!!’
For now the boys are enjoying their accomplishment and plan to donate their prize money to help a school in a South African township in Cape Town buy computers…
