American Energy Data Challenge | Hacker News Reader

American Energy Data Challenge

energychallenge.energy.gov

56 pointsceworthington24 comments

First thought: omg awesome!

Second thought: wait, is this just an essay contest?

Getting paid for an idea? It's every MBAs dream come true!

This is the first of four contests that will run throughout the coming year. Contest #2, scheduled for Jan - March, is going to ask for functioning apps / prototypes that address an idea surfaced in part #1 (with larger prizes). Contest #3 will be a design and visualization challenge.

The goal was to engage a broad community (read: MBAs :-) ... but also energy professionals/researchers that can't necessarily code). But we're hoping to fire up the dev/designer community in Contests #2-4. We've already seen some awesome ideas submitted, so we're hoping this model works well.

Source: I'm currently an Innovation Fellow detailed to the Department of Energy working on Open Data. Hope you all submit an idea!

Seriously, even if no real or scalable solutions are ever provided, the government should hand out 10s of 1000s of business challenges and prizes every year... By having every government department list it's internal data and issues.

Your job would be to improve the processes, and/or solve the issues.

It wouldn't cost that much (the price of healthcare.gov website + a couple of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters), and would gear the nation towards entrepreneurship, a specialists workforce (not a replaceable unit workforce), and growth of startups.

And it would make the gov seem more rational and human.

Some of my Innovation Fellow colleagues at GSA are trying to do just that: making it easier for modern, small web development shops to apply for government IT contracts.

Check it out: https://rfpez.sba.gov/

i just signed up for RFP-EZ, looks great, except all of the existing projects seem to be links to massive FBO RFPs. hopefully more projects are submitted soon!

I'm getting a ton of errors trying to register for RFPEZ. Everything from timeouts to 500 server errors. Feels like the Healthcare.gov issue all over again.

Also, why would one need to "provide a link to an image of your best work"? That seems very contrary to the point of procurement - especially given that so little of the opportunities are for actual design work. Furthermore, how does one link to work performed on an intranet, etc. (as most government work is)?

Seems like it needs to be thought out a little better. Is the "best work" link part of the selection criteria? How does this work with FAR requirements or simplify the RFP/RFQ process?

Hey USNetizen: want to email rfpez@gsa.gov with some of your issues? The team is good, but very small and I know they would love your feedback.

I like how a 24 character password is automatically insecure, while a 16 character one is not... dumb password validation...

Yeah, sorry about that. You have to pick your battles in gov IT.

The company I work for, http://energycurb.com, has a home energy analytics product that might be able to compete in this.

We aren't doing anything with public data but this is giving me some good ideas.

Nice idea but the pay isn't high enough to get my ideas.

interesting older guy in the youtube video

"The Contest is open only to: (a) citizens or permanent residents of the United States"

If you are a foreign hacker in US on TN or H1B or something like that, don't bother.

> and (b) private entities, such as corporations or other organizations, that are incorporated in and maintain a primary place of business in the United States.

That’s not hard.

Hijacking the topic - I'm co-founder of a startup called PetroFeed[1] that's building a GitHub-esque platform for the Oil & Gas industry. We've raised $3.1M, have 7 team members currently, and are moving out of closed beta by the end of the week. If you're a Rails dev interested in this area, I'd love to chat with you!

[1] https://www.petrofeed.com/company/careers

You nonironically use "#hardproblems" in your opening paragraph on that page.

Go clutter up the next "Who's hiring" thread.

Edit: the little robot is adorable, though.

Thanks! His name is Pedro. :D

the staff photo is like a photo of septuplets.

in pyjamas.

basically climate.com for oil&gas or something different?

I'm not super knowledgable about climate.com, but I can tell you what we're doing. For PetroFeed we're taking various data sets (public, commercial, and private) and connecting them into a single network. From there we're looking to provide collaboration tools on top of that network.

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