Iron.io @ Civic Data Challenge

Iron.io is thrilled to be a sponsor of the Civic Data Challenge. It's both a cool tech challenge – its prime goal is to turn raw data around ‘civic health’ into useful applications and visualizations AND a worthwhile cause – providing a great forum to directly impact public decision-making. It's put on by the NCoC (National Conference on Citizenship) and the Knight Foundation and has a number of noted civic data partners involved.

The challenge extends from May to November and has a couple different phases to it. The current phase is the ideation phase (people submit ideas, gather input, and build team members and momentum).

Civic Data Challenge 2013 - Steps to Win

Iron.io is providing some prizes to the winners but more importantly some free computing resource to help the teams do some big things with processing and presenting data. IronMQ, IronWorker, and IronCache were made for this type of challenge.

Here are just a few things our platform can be used for:

• Running lots of concurrent jobs (without having to mess with hadoop)
• Collecting streaming data onto a queue for continual processing
• Orchestrating message and event flows via message queues
• Pushing work to the background or to other processes/endpoints
• Processing work on a schedule

Great things can happen when technology meets civic mindedness, especially when you add big data and visualization to the picture. We're expecting to see great things from the teams in this challenge.