Developers Find Intriguing Ways to Display Data from Kidsdata.org

Innovative data displays like this one are featured in the winning team’s entry.

In the spirit of this week’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, we’d like to announce the winner of kidsdata.org’s recent developer challenge.

In partnership with Health 2.0, our foundation challenged developers and designers to use data from kidsdata.org to create compelling summaries that draw attention to key problems affecting the health and well being of children. Teams were asked to use their creativity in making data about children engaging and easy to understand in any format they chose – a mobile or web application, visualization or game – the goal being to promote action from policymakers, advocates and other stakeholders.

This online challenge is part of a national initiative to foster broad interest in public data, and all the submissions we got for our challenge provided us with interesting perspectives on how we can present data from kidsdata.org. We also participated in a live challenge, or code-a-thon, earlier this year.

The big winner for our foundation’s challenge is Team Big Yellow Star, for its interactive tool Mapping Health, a web-based application that allows users to explore different health indicators by state, county and race/ethnicity, with the goal of revealing racial disparities and areas of improvement. The site consists of four informational sections: state level data, state demographics, county level concerns and race/ethnicity and location.

Many thanks to our judges, subject experts from across California:

  • Ramin Bastani, founder and CEO of Qpid.me
  • Toby Ewing, consultant for California’s Senate Governance and Finance Committee
  • Louis Freedberg, senior reporter for and advisor to California Watch
  • Wendy Lazarus, founder and co-president of The Children’s Partnership
  • Rosie Mestel, editor, Health and Science for the Los Angeles Times

You can learn more details about the Local Children’s Data challenge here, and more details about the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge here.


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