200+ Federal Challenge Competitions Launched

The National Security Agency (NSA) is the 201st federal competition on Challenge.gov.

Challenge.gov hit a milestone this week with federal agencies launching more than 200 challenge and prize competitions! This impressive benchmark comes just a few weeks short of the two-year anniversary of the platform, which launched September 7, 2010.

Another milestone, surpassing 16,000 citizen “solvers” — the people who enter challenge.gov competitions. Congratulations to all who work in this space and are finding new ways to crowdsource and work with the public to solve mission-focused problems.

Now for some news about new challenges from July and early August:

Million Hearts Risk Check
This will be a part of the Million Hearts initiative, a public-private partnership led by Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services (CMS.gov) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to prevent one million heart attacks and strokes by 2017. The challenge is seeking apps that encourage further testing (specifically blood pressure and cholesterol) and lifestyle changes for those at risk.

Campus Rainworks
Focused on student solvers, the challenge is accepting submissions in about a month. The focus is on designing innovative stormwater management projects for college campuses to raise awareness of green design.

DEBUT Challenge – DEsign by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams
This competition just announced winners. The results: Tools for early diagnosis of cancer, low cost spirometer for measuring lung function in under-served populations. Congratulations to National Institute of Health’s Zeynep Erim on success with her first challenge.

My Money App Idea
Congrats to Jim Gatz from Treasury on this ideation challenge, which received 317 submissions. This is an impressive showing from citizens who offered their money app ideas. Winners to be announced on or about August 17th.

National Security Agency (NSA) Visualize This Challenge. We’re so excited to have NSA as part of the Challenge.gov family. While just announced, the challenge will begin accepting submissions in a couple months. A summary:

Problem: Network performance and security depends on being able to quickly and effectively identify the changes occurring in network activity. However, current visualization tools are not suited to displaying these changes in ways that are clear and actionable.

Challenge: Contestants will be presented with a scenario of events and challenged to design a next-generation display that enables a network manager to immediately take appropriate action.

Managing Your Challenge & Prize Competition

If you haven’t already, read the step-by-step Plan, Implement, and Improve toolkit on HowTo.gov.

It’s a solid list of the resources and tips you need to run a challenge. This week, we added a sample Statement of Work that will help you hire outside help. Thanks to Jim Speros from the Department of Veterans Affairs for sharing this material.