Drew Maifeld presents for the SuperRanger team, which took top prize at OpenIowa.
An application that uses public data in an effort to make parks safer emerged Sunday as the winner of the inaugural OpenIowa at StartupCity Des Moines.
SuperRanger, an app created by the team of Drew Maifeld, Yas Kuraishi, Melissa Burkheimer and Bethany Wilcoxon, took took home first place and a $500 prize at the conclusion of OpenIowa, a three-day event put on by StartupIowa.
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OpenIowa, the second public data competition held in the Silicon Prairie this month, was established to empower entrepreneurs, developers and designers to use government databases to create new ways for citizens to access that information. SuperRanger did that by creating an app that alerts women (or anyone) to perceptions of how safe a park feels, as fed by signals from other app users, overlayed with location data from the sexual offender registry. Heroes HelpDesk, which organizes resources for homeless veterans, took home the $250 second-place prize.
Close to 30 participants signed up for OpenIowa, which began on Friday evening and concluded Sunday.
Several participants said previous Startup Weekend experiences had a major influence on how they approached OpenIowa, which followed a similar format. SuperRanger’s Maifeld credited his team’s performance to a scrum board process, which meant each team member focused on a limited set of tasks, as reviewed by the rest of the group.
Another takeaway was that teams should come in knowing as much about the datasets from these kinds of open tables as possible. The general consensus was the teams that were able to execute on the wide information available — particularly including data sets outside the ones presented by local governments and the OpenIowa project — were able to do the most worthwhile work in the time allotted.
Andrew Kirpalani, who participated as a member of the HooVotes team, said he was excited about the feedback loop these government-based projects could engender. The hope is that by demonstrating the usefulness of the data presented, government officials will find ways to make those databases more accessible via APIs and other tools. “It’ll be easier to produce a complete product,” when those tools become more readily available Kirpalani said.
Beyond the weekend, the SuperRanger team is putting the continued pursuit of its app in the hands of Kuraishi, who’s a developer with iApps24. Also, the HooVotes team is putting its working prototype out for users to try.
For more on the inaugural OpenIowa, check out coverage of the event elsewhere:
- Iowa Public Radio: “Got Government Data? There’s an App for That“
- Des Moines Register: “OpenIowa coding teams win with ideas targeting parks, vets“
- Des Moines Register: “Storify: OpenIowa“
- Drake University: “What we can learn from the startup ethos“
For another look at the event, see the photos below from the weekend at StartupCity.
The weekend started with 14 pitch ideas, and those were whittled down to four final presentations.
Participants and observers await Sunday’s presentations at Startup City Des Moines.
Micah Honeycutt demos a working prototype of HooVotes, a social app that assigns a participation score to a person’s voting history and compares that to scores of other voters in that person’s vicinity.
Kevin Powell shows off MoneyTrail, designed to visualize where federal election money originates by geography.
Credits: Photos courtesy of Drew Maifeld.
Note: Michael Stacy contributed to this story.
