City of Syracuse Announces Opening of Second Data Challenge

Published on May 02, 2023

Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh and the Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation (API) announced the City’s second Syracuse Data Challenge. The Syracuse Data Challenge is a month-long contest for members of the community with an interest in open data for the public good. The Syracuse Data Challenge asks residents to creatively use datasets from the city’s open data portal to build a data visualization, website application, data analysis, map, chatbot, or any other type of project that uses the featured data. 

The second iteration of the Syracuse Data Challenge begins on Tuesday, May 2 and closes Friday, May 31 at midnight and uses the SeeClickFix/SyrCityLine Dataset, a dataset comprised of resident services requests made with SeeClickFix.

The City hopes the data challenge will continue to drive awareness and engagement of newly available datasets on the open data portal at data.syr.gov. The winner will receive a $25 gift card to a local diner sponsored by Syracuse Salesforce Developers.  More importantly, the winner will be recognized by having their work featured in the ‘Projects’ section of the open data portal and will be invited to sign the Innovator’s Wall at the API Office in City Hall.

The first data challenge took place from March 2 to March 31, 2023 and used the Public Art Dataset. Nick Johnson, a data analyst and the owner of Ataviz Consulting, a local business providing data analytics services, won the challenge for his interactive dashboard using the Syracuse Public Art dataset.

Anyone can take part in the Syracuse Data Challenge. To receive the prize, the winning project owner be physically in or able to travel to the city of Syracuse. More information on the Syracuse Data Challenge can be found at https://data.syr.gov/pages/data-challenge.