New York's Pursuit of a More Useful App Contest

Though it’s not quite Silicon Valley, New York City has a robust tech community full of startups that are eager to get their hands on government data. Couple that with a city that’s hungry for newfangled solutions to their toughest problems—affordable housing, public health, transportation, and the like—and that’s how NYC’s annual BigApps contest has endured over the past seven years.

Like other government app contests that began around the same time, this one wanted the tech community to build a product that would make life in the city easier. But BigApps’s initial approach was haphazard: It released its repertoire of data and told developers to sift through it and repackage the data in something of a free-for-all, with little guidance. The problem with letting developers define the problem, though, was that “geeks will build apps for getting bicycle directions, they'll build apps for finding cocktail and coffee specials, not the kinds of things that working mothers need,” Anthony Townsend, author of Smart Cities, told CityLab in 2014.