Hat in the ring

The 2008 NetSquared conference (N2Y3) will be about the results of their Mashup Challenge. The Challenge is an invitation to nonprofits to think up a  mashup that would serve their cause and submit a proposal to build it. The top proposals will be decided by voting by the NetSquared community. The winners will be matched up with programmers from big name shops in the Silicon Valley to make the mashup a reality. The results will be exhibited at N2Y3 and top prizes awarded.

Ideas for an ACS mashup have been floating around for a couple of years, but, as far as I know, the only concrete outcome is Patrick Shore’s Relay/Google Map mashup for Georgia. (I think he just took the bull by the horns, as they say.) I contacted Patrick and asked if he was interested in the NetSquared mashup contest, and, fortunately, he said yes. He contacted some data folks at National and we got a hasty conversation going. My sense of the competition is that the mashup will have to show a direct benefit to your organization’s constituents to stand a chance to be picked for support. So I suggested we focus on seeing what a series of overlays on a Google map of cancer incidence and mortality would tell us when combined with overlays of data about income, insurance coverage, facilities, and other indicators of access to care–or lack thereof. The idea would be to visualize what the statistics say. I think a picture is worth a thousand words. My first impression on seeing Patrick’s GA Relay mashup was, "Wow! Look at all the Relays. Being in Relay is being part of something BIG."

The deadline for the proposals is rapidly approaching, so I quickly whipped up a proposal  you can see here. Having spent last Friday at Google (I’m on the right in the pic above taking tutoring from Pamela Fox, center, of Google’s Maps API Team) with other nonprofit folks with proposals, I can say it certainly will be a challenge to do this thing. There are a bunch of technical issues (JAVAscripters please contact me), and just getting the data from public sources like SEER and the Census Bureau in compatible formats will be a job. But I think it’s worth it.

I invite anyone to read the proposal and give feedback in the comments.  We have until Friday, the 14th to finalize the proposal.