With every day that goes by, there are more and more situations for which governments turn to citizens looking for ideas, projects and engagement for the planning of the city or country we live in.
In the last years from the Buenos Aires City Government we organized different idea, apps, projects contests, with the goal of stimulating civic innovation and citizen engagement.
We created Open Challenge BA as a contest platform and hosted our instance: http://concursos.buenosaires.gob.ar/
From the notion that all challenges have an end date it was obvious to think of an all-encompassing platform that allows us to manage multiple contests with different roles and conditions and not create a new website for each.
Buenos Aires is an open by default city. We know we have to create solutions that can be reused by other cities and organizations, and that’s why we decided to create this platform.
The platform was born as a fork of the hackaton managing platform HackDash, an open source platform developed by Dan Zajdband for Hack/Hackers Media Party.
Open Challenge BA allows an organization (city, state, NGO) to create contests, sharing modules, user accounts and maintaining a decentralized management.
Its architecture is based on NodeJS and MongoDB.
Main Features
- Multiple contests administration
- Each contest has its own look and feel
- Integrated voting system
- Different models of participation / contests
- Custom contest fields
- OpenID / SSO integration
We want this platform to grow, that’s why we invite developers and governments to reuse our platform and add hours of development for it to keep growing as an open solution to drive citizen engagement.
You can find the source code in our Github/GCBA: https://github.com/gcba/open-challenge