APPLICATIONS AND LESSONS FROM HACKING FOR HUNGER

THE FOOD SECURITY OPEN DATA CHALLENGE

Each day almost 1 billion people around the world will go to bed hungry. Two hundred million of them will be children. Global climate change, with its increased droughts and less predictable rains, threatens to make this problem worse. Meanwhile, to feed a population expected to grow to 9 billion people by 2050, the world will have to double its current food production and reduction in post-harvest losses and waste.

Food security is a significant and complex challenge that requires the effort and resources of all sectors—public, private and civil society—willing to lend a hand. That is why I am excited to introduce this case study of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Food Security Open Data Challenge (FSODC). The FSODC is exactly the kind of innovative, collaborative initiative that USAID’s Office of Innovation and Development Alliances (IDEA) strives to advance. By bringing together people with good ideas, technological know-how and an entrepreneurial spirit, the FSODC not only resulted in seven working food security apps, it also demonstrated that government agencies, data technologists, and social innovators can work together to find creative solutions to development problems.

I had the opportunity to kickoff the FSODC’s 48-hour “hackathon”—the event during which USAID development specialists and computer programmers actually came together to build their food security software apps. The energy in the room was palpable—even the virtual participants seemed to feel it.

As the weekend came to a close, a group of over eighty people revealed some truly outstanding products. The Grameen Foundation and Palantir Technologies collaborated to build a tool that analyzes data to give real-time crop disease alerts and make suggestions for farming best practices. Sonjara created a website that links the importance of nutrition to local farming practices. And the Pineapple Project and Grower’s Nation developed a tool that provides farmers precise suggestions on what crops to plant and where to plant them. Most importantly, all this was done with information and data available for anyone to use.

The FSODC was initiated by USAID as part of its commitment to promote the increased use of “open data”—data made freely available to the public in easy-to-use formats. In addition to encouraging the Agency to more fully embrace open data best practices, the FSODC highlighted how our own staff takes advantage of open data every day in their work. I hope the experiences and lessons we share in this case study can be useful to you as you look to scale up your own open data initiatives and develop tech-savvy solutions to today’s major challenges.

Sincerely,

Ricardo MichelActing Director of the Office of Innovation and Development Alliances

INTRODUCTIONImagine farmers in remote areas of developing countries being able to receive information on a rapidly spreading chicken blight within 20 minutes of the first chickens succumbing to the disease.

That is exactly the future that Palantir, a software developer and data analysis company, partnered with the Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit committed to fighting poverty, to create during USAID’s Food Security Open Data Challenge (FSODC). By developing a phone-based app that builds on information gathered by local community workers, Palantir and Grameen are striving to identify potential disease outbreaks in Uganda and create an alert system for farmers who might be affected.

Palantir and Grameen’s joint effort represents just one of the incredible applications (apps) developed during the FSODC, an initiative to bring software developers and development experts together to find powerful new ways to use existing data to address one of the world’s most pressing challenges—food security.

The FSODC—and the Hackathon that was the fulcrum of its app development process—was the first event of its kind for USAID. As a leader in U.S. Government open data initiatives, USAID hopes that by sharing its experience and lessons learned during the FSODC, other government institutions, donor agencies, and development organizations will be emboldened to find ways to engage key stakeholders to use open data and

cutting-edge technology to solve critical challenges.

This document is divided in to three sections. Since models such as open data and hackathons may still be new to many in the international development and government arenas, “The Concept,” describes major open data terms and larger U.S. Government open data initiatives. “The Food Security Open Data Challenge,” outlines the goals of and specific outcomes of this initiative. And “Recommendations and Best Practices: Looking forward to future open data challenges” summarizes suggestions for future data challenges.

RESULTS FROM THE GET-GOThe Food Security Open Data Challenge (FSODC) may have been a first for USAID, but it has already had significant reach and impact for a pilot initiative.

Five teams developed fully functioning apps that were being used and continually improved just six months later. Public interest in the FSODC was high, generating profile pieces in FastCo.Exist, Scientific American, and numerous food security and data blogs.

The FSODC also engendered broader Agency interest in the potential of open data, leading to a White House-hosted Development DataJam in December 2012. Since then, USAID has sought to recruit and reassign some of the brightest data minds in the industry to build a permanent team of individuals solely dedicated to advancing the agency’s use and creation of open development data.

Farmers compare irrigation guidance received from USAID’s Morocco Economic Competitiveness (MEC) program, which uses text messages to relay information gathered from local weather stations on temperatures, rainfall and other data automatically.

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THE CONCEPT

WHAT IS OPEN DATA? Open data encompasses a number of different meanings. The FSODC organizers found it useful to think of open data as a spectrum that covers a range of access and applications of data.

In its most literal form, open data is freely available machine-readable data that anyone can use for any purpose, including commercial. Machine-readable refers to programmer-friendly formats. For instance, providing spreadsheets in comma separated values (.CSV) format, encoding documents in Extended Markup Language (XML), or including datasets in Application Programming Interfaces (API), which are designed for other software programs to more easily interact with the data. Word documents, PDFs, websites, and web calculators, all of which can be easily read by humans on computers, are not considered machine-readable because they cannot be easily searched, sorted, and analyzed by code.

One example of this kind of actionable, freely available open data includes Global Positioning System (GPS) data, which has created an entire industry--an industry worth an estimated $90 billion to the U.S. economy. Another example includes weather data, which fuels production of television channels, websites and apps that returns more than $4 billion dollars annually to the U.S. economy.

In the middle of the spectrum is data that has limited access and restrictions on use. USAID’s MEASURE Demographic Health Surveys (MEASURE DHS) disseminates this kind of data. Users must apply to use the data from DHS nationally representative household surveys covering areas of health, population, and nutrition and provide justification of how the information will be used. Importantly, Measure DHS data cannot be used for any commercial purpose or profit; it is only available for research applications.

Towards the other end of the spectrum, open data also includes voluntarily contributed personal data, made available back to consumers safely and securely, using a common industry format--also called smart disclosure data. For example, through its Blue Button initiative, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has made it easy for individuals using programs like Medicare to download their medical information and claims forms safely and securely. This data is available only to the individuals to which it pertains and thus is not available to programmers such as those that participated in the FSODC.

Finally, at the edge of the spectrum is potential open data--information that could be made available to the public once certain measures have been taken to protect personally identifiable information and security concerns. An example of this kind of data includes the baseline surveys conducted by Feed the Future. As collected, these data contained household addresses, useful for surveyors in revisiting the same locations in the future to collect follow-on data. However to protect the anonymity of participants, addresses and other personally identifiable information were removed prior to publishing the survey’s findings on www.usaid.gov/developer.

Whether it is freely available data, sensitive data made more available to qualified audiences, or personal smart disclosure data, open data can come from the federal, state, or local government, as well as from the private sector.

SPEAK OPEN DATAThe lexicon of open data and hackathons may be daunting at first. For a more complete list of useful open data terms, visit White House-founded Project Open Data’s collaborative website at http://project-open-data.github.io/glossary.

HOW THE USG AND USAID ENGAGE IN OPEN DATAOpen data is a priority of the U.S. Government and USAID. It is critical to government transparency and accountability, private sector innovation and business growth and improved government service delivery.

In order to increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government, the White House has introduced a number of open data initiatives. In May 2009, it launched Data.gov, which contains nearly 450,000 publicly available open data sets from across the U.S. government.

On December 8, 2009, the White House issued the Open Government Directive, which requires federal agencies to take immediate steps to achieve key milestones in transparency, participation, and collaboration. This included specific measures for publishing and improving the quality of government data available online.

On May 23, 2012, President Obama launched the Digital Government Strategy to promote citizen access to government data. According to this strategy, the U.S. government will promote the “liberation” of government data and voluntarily contributed corporate data to fuel entrepreneurship and improve the lives of people around the world.

The three main objects of the Digital Government Strategy are:

• Enable the American people and an increasingly mobile workforce to access high-quality digital government information and services anywhere, anytime, on any device.

• Ensure that as the government adjusts to this new digital world, we seize the opportunity to procure and

USAID OPEN DATA: MAKING A SUSTAINABLE DIFFERENCE IN KENYAAs United States Chief Technology Officer and Special Assistant to the President Todd Park has said, “Data by itself is useless…It’s only useful if you apply it to create an actual public benefit. You need appliers—you need entrepreneurs to know data’s there, available in order for them to turn it into awesomeness.”

USAID realizes that awesome appliers come from everywhere. For example, Jimmy Wambua, a young entrepreneur in Nairobi, Kenya, saw a problem. Smallholder farmers’ crop yields were not reaching their full potential and growers were not getting a fair price. Decisions about what crops to plant and when were made on speculation and instinct, and farmers sold their crops based on prices offered by middlemen and traders. A solution seemed evident: increase farmers’ access to existing public information in a way they could easily use.

Jimmy joined the M-Farm organization that set up a text-message based mobile phone application for farmers. The app helps farmers get a better price for their crops by providing them information on current market prices—so they no longer have to rely on the word of the buyer—and a platform for farmers to sell their goods online. USAID contributed to the work of M-Farm—not through a grant or loan or other financial capital—but with information capital. With the release of an open data set from the Famine Early Warning System (FEWSNet), M-Farm now has access to ten years of historic data about market prices of crops, which show trends in crop price fluctuation, and enables better decision making on which crops to plant to yield the highest income.

With this information, M-Farm is creating value for for farmers which is improving their incomes, generating revenues for a sustainable business model, and addressing one of USAID’s key strategic priorities, food security.

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manage devices, applications, and data in smart, secure and affordable ways.

• Unlock the power of government data to spur innovation across the U.S. and improve the quality of services for the American people.

Most recently, President Obama issued an Executive Order entitled Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information. According to the Executive Order, released May 9, 2013, “Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable.”

Thanks in part to these efforts, the U.S. government now has nearly 450,000 data sets online and available to the public at Data.gov.

USAID has been a leader in implementing these open data directives and policies. In addition to the Food Security Open Data Challenge discussed in this publication, USAID has:

• Created an API for the “Green Book,” a database of U.S. foreign assistance, including military assistance, to every country in the world since 1946. The data include program-level information by country.

• Published the datasets and APIs for ten years of Development Credit Authority (DCA) bank loan guarantees to 100,000 entrepreneurs in new markets across 67 countries. And in 2012, DCA invited volunteer coders to help it crowdsource the visualization of this data.

• Rolled out the MEASURE Demographic Health Survey database of more than 260 nationally representative health surveys for population, health, and nutrition indicator data.

FOOD SECURITY AND OPEN DATA“Global hunger is one of the most important challenges of our generation. Almost a billion people are going to bed hungry every night,” stated Julie Howard, USAID Chief Scientist in USAID’s Bureau for Food Security, in her kick-off remarks for Hacking for Hunger.

Food security is especially interesting within the framework of an open data challenge, because of the vast amount of data involved. Food security impacts and is impacted by many different areas—weather, climate, population growth, migration, nutrition, health, land use, and soil quality to name a few. A plethora of datasets exist that measure some part of these numerous areas and there is a clear need to bring these data sets together for a deeper understanding of food security.

Food security is a critical issue. To meet the needs of a world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, agricultural production will need to increase by at least 60 percent.

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• Supported the release of Feed the Future data relevant to food security, including the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index dataset, the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey dataset and the Ghana Baseline Household Survey dataset.

THE FOOD SECURITY OPEN DATA CHALLENGE

THE OPEN DATA CHALLENGE MODELBetween May and October 2012, USAID held the Food Security Open Data Challenge (FSODC), involving over 100 participants from five countries. It contributed to a core development priority, food security, as well as the U.S. Government’s wider commitment to open data—a commitment to make data available to new audiences in ways that improve lives in the U.S. and abroad. USAID organized the FSODC around the issue of food security, a subject that can only be addressed through the use of a diverse array of data.

Through the FSODC, USAID sought to meet three goals:

• Develop new applications that utilize data to address a gap in the field of global food security and agriculture;

• Demonstrate that government agencies, data technologists, social innovators and entrepreneurs can work together to bring creative solutions to development problems; and

• Build a community of actors and organizations to engage USAID and our partners on open data for development

The FSODC followed an adaptation of the traditional information technology plan-build-run model developed by U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and first implemented at the Department of Health and Human Services. This same model is outlined by the White House’s Open Data Initiative. USAID adapted the model to fit its specific community, while maintaining the core tenets of:

• Ideation Jam: A brainstorming session to identify key innovation opportunities in the overlap of food security and available data sets.

“You take the data that’s already there and jujitsu it, put it in machine-readable form, let entrepreneurs take it and turn it into awesomeness. It’s about turning government into a platform for open innovation.”

TODD PARK, U.S. CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER AND SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT, SEPTEMBER 22ND, 2012

USAID’s FSODC consisted of three separate components: the Ideation Jam to plan the kinds of apps to develop; Hacking for Hunger, the hackathon to develop apps; and the Showcase, to support getting the apps up and running.

•Hackathon: A weekend-long gathering of data technologists, issue area experts, and software developers to devise solutions to problems identified at the Ideation Jam. Groups work with self-identified teams to create products for potential investment;

• Showcase: An opportunity to announce challenge winners and exhibit some of the best ideas for data-related solutions to food security.

The three phases of the FSODC were executed over a 5-month period in order provide sufficient incubation time for developers and subject matter experts to grow their final products. However, the fulcrum of process was the FSODC’s hackathon, Hacking for Hunger, during which the building of the food security apps took place.

HACKING FOR HUNGER: MAKING AN APP FOR THATAccording to Wikipedia, “A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, codeathon, or codefest) is an event in which computer programmers and others in the field of software development, like graphic designers, interface designers and project managers, collaborate intensively on software projects.”

The FSODC took this definition one step further by “mashing up” seven teams of technologists, computer programmers and food security experts to create websites and mobile apps that tackle some of the world’s greatest food security challenges through USAID’s first hackathon, Hacking for Hunger.

Hackathons follow a crowdsourcing model: participants volunteer their time and skills to produce the final product. Motivations vary from person to person, but volunteers generally contribute because of a sense of altruism, the opportunity to build skills in a fun environment, a chance to network, the opportunity to demonstrate their skills to experts in their field, and the opportunity to be part of a team that produces a product that may someday make a profit. This was the case of Hacking for Hunger. While USAID did not offer any specific financial incentives for competing teams, many individuals that participated in Hacking for Hunger were budding social entrepreneurs looking to well by doing good.

Most of the participants first connected during one of the two Ideation Jams convened in June 2012 to identify important gaps in food security and potential opportunities to use open data to address these gaps. Based on the discussions initiated at these brainstorming sessions, participants built teams and began to collaborate to build out a plan for their open data application, working with USAID to locate the appropriate data to implement their prototype.

Hacking for Hunger took place September 14-16, 2012. The teams—representing five countries, seven time zones and 80 volunteers—gathered in person and online to build their apps. Over the course of 48 hours, seven teams built innovative software applications addressing critical food security challenges.

FSODC APPS: MAKING THE CODE TO FOOD SECURITYAt the conclusion of Hacking for Hunger, participating teams presented their finalized apps to a panel of expert judges. A number of standout teams emerged and were given the opportunity to showcase their apps on World Food Day at the Iowa Hunger Summit, and participate in the World Food Prize and Borlaug Dialogue events.

Hacking for Hunger team members gather in-person and virtually to develop innovative food security apps.

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Top-rated teams included established organizations Grameen Bank and Palantir Technologies; small startups Digital Green, Sonjara, and GeoWiki and proof-of-concept upstarts PineApple Project and Grower’s Nation. Their Apps addressed critical food security issues like pest control, crop disease, illegal land grabbing, community nutrition and farmer education.

Grameen Foundation and Palantir Technologies Grameen Foundation, a world recognized non-profit, partnered with Palantir Technologies, a leading global data analysis corporation, to build an app combining on-the-ground knowledge with modern technology. It has already been used to identify a maggot outbreak in soybeans and send an alert about the potential spread of that outbreak to neighboring famers. The tool draws on surveys collected from the Grameen Foundation’s community knowledge workers, feeds them into Palantir’s data analysis tools, and returns alerts and suggestions for best practices to smallholder farmers in Uganda.

Sonjara, Inc. A women-run small IT business based in northern Virginia, Sonjara, Inc. constructed a full website that links the importance of nutrition to local farming practices. Partnering with the Helen Keller Foundation, the team built a recommendation tool using weather, soil, and nutrition open data sets that suggests what plants to farm and eat that both provide the nutrients that that community lacks and have the best chance of growing in a specific location.

The Pineapple Project and Grower’s Nation These teams kicked off their project during the April 2012 NASA Space Apps Challenge and have since built a global community of workers over the course of three hackathons. During Hacking for Hunger, they finessed their database of all relevant food and farming open data sets such as weather, soil pH levels, location data, and market prices of crops. To do so, they convened young volunteers in multiple locations and countries to progress towards a comprehensive database and a tool to analyze historic weather data, soil quality, and crop yields to deliver targeted suggestions to smallholder farmers on what crops to plant and where.

A Grameen Foundation community knowledge worker speaks with a Ugandan farmer about accessing farming best practices via text messages.

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“To support an open source development approach, our Agency must serve as a platform that connects world’s biggest development challenges to development problems solvers – all around the world. We recognize that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not.”

USAID ADMINISTRATOR RAJIV SHAH, AUGUST 1, 2012

Digital Green The New Delhi-based non-profit Digital Green shares agricultural instructional videos produced by farmers, of farmers, and for farmers to enhance productivity and boost farmers’ incomes. The team incorporated an open data analysis tool into its regular workflow to ensure that its product was effectivly delivering high quality information.

Geo-Wiki Drawing on the largest portion of volunteers, many with no computer programming or food security expertise, Geo-Wiki worked to resolve discrepancies in land use and ownership using open

source satellite images. Volunteers were asked to zoom into key coordinates on Google Earth mapping software and match text messages and photos from individuals in Ethiopia to build a more accurate land use map. Using the crowdsourced information, Geo-Wiki seeks to mitigate existing discrepancies between the government of Ethiopia’s official records of land use and ownership.

VIRTUAL TOOLS WITH REAL-WORLD IMPACTThe FSODC successfully fulfilled its role as a pilot project and demonstrated the significant impact that open data initiatives can have—even with a limited budget—by engaging committed private sector and citizen volunteers.

In addition to the quality apps that came from the initiative, the FSODC raised the profile of the integral role open data plays in impactful international development. Profile pieces in FastCo.Exist and Scientific American, numerous blog posts, Twitter conversations and the Iowa Hunger Summit raised awareness in people across sectors on how they can collaborate to make a difference in the fight against one of the world’s most pressing issues. Inspired by the FSODC’s proven demand for USAID data, USAID policy makers are currently collaborating to produce an Agency Data Strategy to improve the collection, sharing, analysis, and application of data to increase the quality and impact of data relevant to international development. And through this publication, USAID hopes to encourage other U.S. government agencies and international development practitioners to think outside their silos and find new ways to collaborate with technologists on game-changing innovations.

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A smallholder farmer places an online bid to sell maize.

GET OPEN DATAWant to use USAID and U.S. government open data? Visit the following websites to get started:

• www.usaid.gov/developer,

• www.foreignassistance.gov,

• www.data.gov

“ I want us to ask ourselves every day, how are we using technology to make a real difference in people’s lives. ”

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, MAY 2012, DIGITAL GOVERNMENT STRATEGY

RECOMMENDATIONS & BEST PRACTICES: LOOKING FORWARD TO FUTURE OPEN DATA CHALLENGESFrom the beginning, the FSODC was seen as a pilot project by which USAID could build not only useful food security apps, but internal support for open data initiatives and a community of interested data and technology stakeholders. The format of an ideation jam, hackathon, and showcase were invaluable to ensure a successful structure and execution. In addition, the FSODC organizing team has identified a number of other recommendations and best practices for organizers of Open Data Challenges:

• Engage early and often. Reach out to any and all government and non-government organizations that are invested in the issue area, and ensure that they have familiarity with purpose and benefit of open data initiatives.

• Ensure vocal, high-level champions. In order to facilitate broad staff engagement, it is important that they view the efforts around an Open Data Challenge as having high-level institutional support throughout the organization.

• Cultivate sustained collaboration between subject matter experts, team leads, and participants. The impressive reputation of USAID subject matter experts drew many technologists and participating organizations to sign-up for the FSODC. Future open data challenge organizers should look to cultivate similar interactions between such groups and seek opportunities to maintain these relationships beyond the open data challenge.

•Articulate off-ramps for each of the products. Even the most attractive tool or application will not add value if it is not in use after the challenge has ended. Ensure that the teams have demonstrated a plan for ensuring adoption of their products.

•Tap into team leads. Coordination of a successful open data challenge requires active team leads that are driving the development of their product and identifying which datasets, expertise, and support they need to ensure a successful product.

• Increase emphasis on the release and use of open data. The U.S. Government’s greatest value-add in the open data initiative space is supplying its own data. Specifically in the FSODC, USAID served a convening role and, with the support of its subject matter experts, was able to direct team leads and participants to a variety of government and other open data sources. USAID owns an amazing wealth of information with the potential to serve people in the developing countries—we should continue to seek ways to make this information more transparent. The U.S. Government White Open Data Policy will increase the availability of government-supported data to work with.

• Identify judges early. Having high-profile judges locked-in early raises the visibility of an Open Data Challenge and makes volunteering at a hackathon more attractive to potential participants, who may see it as an opportunity to advance their own skills and careers.

•Budget for your best showcase. From a 1,600-person showcase to exclusive presentations at the White House to high-profile industry events, the final event for any open data challenge should be determined based on impact. Determine early on what audience needs to be reached and what the best platform is for reaching them.

•Provide incentives to winning teams. Open Data Challenges are not designed as contests for cash prizes. Their reward is improving a business model or social enterprise by virtue of information capital. The prospect of “becoming famous” by presenting that solution on stage at a global event, the experience, networking, or perhaps a flight ticket to the showcase event, is enough.

•Have fun. Because open data is awesome!

REFERENCESBurwell, S., VanRoekel, S., Park, T. and Mancini, D. (2013, May 9). Memorandum for the Heads of Executive

Departments and Agencies, M-13-13. Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/2013/m-13-13.pdf.

Crowdsourcing Transparency: Development Credit Authority Loan Data. (2013, February 1). usaid.gov. Retrieved from http://www.usaid.gov/results-and-data/progress-data/data/dca.

Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People. (2012, May 23). Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digital-government/digital-government-strategy.pdf.

Executive Order -- Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information. (2013, May 9). Retreived from http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/09/executive-order-making-open-and-machine-readable-new-default-government-

Grameen Foundation and Palatir : Partners for Food Security. (2012, October 12). Retrieved from http://www.palantir.com/2012/10/grameen-foundation-palantir-partners-for-food-security/

Grosser, S., Roberts, S., and Swartley, D. B. Crowdsourcing to Geocode Development Credit Authority Data: A Case Study. (June 2012). usaid.gov. Retrieved from http://transition.usaid.gov/our_work/economic_growth_and_trade/development_credit/pdfs/2012/USAIDCrowdsourcingCaseStudy.pdf

Lichtenstein, J. (2011, June 28). Why Open Data Alone is Not Enough. Wired. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/st_essay_datafireworks/.

Manning, N. and Townsend, K. (2012, November/December) Hacking for Hunger: Let the Games Begin. Frontlines. Retrieved from http://transition.usaid.gov/press/frontlines/fl_dec12/FL_dec12_HACKATHON.html

Open Data Highlights. Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov//sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/2013opendata.pdf.

Orszag, P. (2009, December 8). Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies, M-10-06. Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/documents/open-government-directive

Schiller, B. Hacking Projects to Use Data to Solve Hunger. Co.Exist Retrieved from http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680568/hacking-projects-to-use-data-to-solve-hunger.

Townsend, K. (2013, May 8). Why Open Data Matters: G-8 and African Nations Increase Open Data for Food Security. USAID IMPACT blog. Retreived from http://blog.usaid.gov/2013/05/why-open-data-matters-g-8-and-african-nations-increase-open-data-for-food-security/ Rice farmers examine information on their cell phones.

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FRONT COVER PHOTO CREDIT: PANOS

THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSUSAID’s Food Security Open Data Challenge would not have been possible without the support and dedication of numerous people, including: Todd Park, catalyst, mentor and inspiration for USAID’s first Open Data Initiative; Maura O’Neill, USAID’s former Chief Innovation Officer and our most vocal champion; Ricardo Michel, USAID’s Acting Director of Innovation and Development Alliances, who provided thought leadership and coordination throughout; Nathaniel Manning, USAID’s first Presidential Innovation Fellow, and advocate for open data across USAID; and Dr. Rajiv Shah, USAID Administrator, a true leader in testing new approaches for solving some of the world’s toughest challenges.

Thank you to the Hacking for Hunger judges: Harlan Yu, Open Government Data specialist and Co-Founder of Robinson+Yu; Gunnar Hellekson, U.S. Public Sector Chief Technology Strategist, Red Hat; Susan Heinein, Administrator of Foreign Agricultural Services, U.S. Department of Agriculture; and Philip M. Parker, Chair Professorship of Management Science at INSEAD. Your expertise and dedication was inspiration to more than just the hackathon participants.

Additional thanks to Alison Fraser, program manager for Hacking for Hunger, and Kat Townsend, project lead for the Food Security Open Data Challenge, without whom this work would not have been possible.

Sincere thanks to Elvira Felix, Jovan King, Michael Starkweather, Sarosh Hussain, Nilam Prasai, Amanda Gibson, Kate Gage, Gunnar Hellekson, and Linda See for all their support of the FSODC behind the scenes. For all contributors, both listed and not: thank you.

U.S. Agency for International Development1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20523Tel: (202) 712-0000Fax: (202) 216-3524www.usaid.gov