OICT, EC DIGIT Announce Winners of the “Smart Cities” Challenges in Cooperation with OpenStreetMap

The Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) and the Directorate-General for Informatics of the European Commission (DG DIGIT) today announced in an award ceremony (video) the winners of the “Smart Cities” challenges, the second innovation event from the Open Source Software for Sustainable Development Goals (OSS4SDG) initiative.

The four-week event ran from 3 October to 8 November and was hosted on the Unite Ideas website. Forty-nine solutions were submitted by nearly 100 open source software enthusiasts from 24 different countries, who showed their commitment, passion and talent for building solutions that can help those in need.

During the competition, participants were mentored by Open Street Map, UN and EU representatives to establish concrete software solutions that can be reused through open source licensing terms and conditions.

The winners and finalists of the OSS4SDG – SDG11: “Smart Cities” challenges follow.

Winners:

• First Prize: “SDG 11 progress tracker for cities”, by Micky Yun Chan 
  The solution provides analysis tools for urban centrality and walkability. Micky is an Erasmus Mundus Software Engineer for Green Deal (SE4GD) based in the Netherlands.

• Second Prize: “Biking improver”, by Francesco Weikmann , Riccardo Nanni, Maurizio Napolitano.
  The solution increases OpenStreetMap bike lanes and cyclability data through gamification. The Team is part of Fondazione Bruno Kessler, a research non-profit public interest located in Italy.

• Third Prize: “Holocene”, by Brendan Lim.
  The solution measures, benchmarks, and tracks progress of all 17 SDGs. Brendan is a freelance sustainability consultant based in Melbourne, Australia.

• Special Mention of the jury: “Communities”, by Brian DeRocher. The solution supports local city-level groups of mappers. Brian has been a volunteer mapper with OpenStreetMap for 13 years from the United States.

The other Finalists included:

• “CityGML Data Import”, by Ibuki Shibayama - Japan
• “Green 15 Minute City”, by Marcel Reinmuth , Rutendo Mukaratirwa , Sukanya Randhawa , Maya Moritz , Charles Hatfield, Christina Ludwig  - Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) – Germany
• “Tsunami Visualization 3D Map”, by Naoki Ohashi – Japan
• “Yet Another Open Map (YAOM)”, by Santiago Crespo - Spain

About the UN and EC “Open Source Software for Sustainable Development Goals (OSS4SDG)” joint initiative

To foster collaboration to tackle Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) challenges with the help of open source software, the United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) together with the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT) are launching a series of innovation challenges in the framework of the “Open Source Software for Sustainable Development Goals (OSS4SDG)” initiative.

For each of the 17 SDGs, an innovation event will be held. Through these, participants will work with mentors to establish concrete solutions on open source software platforms.