Rules

The Government 2.0 Taskforce is holding the “MashupAustralia” contest between October 7 and November 13th, 2009. By making a submission to the MashupAustralia contest you are agreeing to the following rules:

1. Prizes (aka. “the Mashies”)

  • $10,000 for Excellence in Mashing category
  • $5,000 for Highly Commendable Mashups
  • $2,500 for Notable Mashing Achievements

In addition, we are also offering some additional prizes for the following categories:

  • $2,000 for the People’s Choice Mashup prize
  • $2,000 for the Best Student entry
  • $1,000 bonuses for the Transformation Challenge

We may even award more than one prize for each category if we are overwhelmed by quality mashups!

2. Winners

All winning entries will be invited to present their entry via videoconference to the Government 2.0 Taskforce.

Potentially winning entries will be advised via the email address details provided on the submissions form. If a potential winner does not respond within ten business days of the date of the notification, that winner will be disqualified and the next highest scoring entry will be selected as an alternate winner.

3. MashupAustralia entries

We don’t have the ability to host mashups or mashup code, so you need to provide us with a link to a working copy of our your mashup on a publicly available website, along with any additional technical or user documentation relevant to your mashup. We have deliberately decided not to be prescriptive about what tools we want you to use in building your mashups — after all, the web moves so fast that the list will be out of date five minutes after we publish it! Our only request is that you try to stick to tools that will be easy for the judges to use so we can enjoy assessing your mashup rather than trying to install unfamiliar platforms. It goes without saying that we have an overwhelming preference for web-based tools (but we still need to say it anyway).

All mashup entries must also use at least one of the datasets provided for this contest, but you are free to mash them with other datasets as long as their licensing terms are consistent with the rules of MashupAustralia. You may also use any publicly accessible web services as long as it does not incur a financial cost to use (private and subscription APIs are prohibited).

4. Final date

To be eligible for judging, all submissions must be received by 4pm Australian Eastern Standard Time on November 13, 2009.

5. Judging Criteria

All MashupAustralia entries will be judged by the panel appointed by the Taskforce against the following criteria:

  • Originality
  • Consistency with contest purposes including social value
  • Quality and design (including standards compliance)
  • Usability (including documentation and ease of use)

The Bonus Prize/s for the Transformation Challenge will be awarded for entries that significantly enhance and/or make datasets available for re-use programmatically. In awarding these bonus prizes, the judges will also take into account the value of the enhancements and the scalability and ease of use of the technical solution underlying your mashup. Bonus prizes will also only be available to those entries that provide free and open access to this enhanced data.

6. Eligibility

To be eligible for prizes, solo entrants must be either an Australian resident or Australian citizen or for team entrants, at least one member of the team must be an Australian resident or Australian citizen. It’s only fair – it is the MashupAustralia contest after all.

To qualify for one of special prizes, you must:

  • For the Student’s Prize, be enrolled in a recognised secondary schooling or tertiary institution (e.g. TAFE, Uni) in Australia
  • For the Transformation Challenge: significantly enhance and/or open up for programmatic access at least one of the datasets provided for this contest in the process of building your mashup. This might be by building an API for your mashup to allow the extraction of enhanced, enriched mashed up data.

7. Nature of submissions

Don’t do bad things. This contest has been designed to demonstrate the benefit of open access and Government 2.0. Please participate in and engage with the contest in that spirit and in good faith. You must not include submissions that are:

  • potentially libellous, false, defamatory or overtly political statements;
  • material which is potentially confidential, commercially sensitive, or which may cause personal distress or loss;
  • any commercial endorsement, promotion of any product, service or publication;
  • privacy invasive;
  • language which is offensive, obscene or otherwise inappropriate; or
  • misleading, deceptive, violate a third party’s rights or are otherwise contrary to law.

We reserve the right to reject submissions that do not comply with the letter and spirit of these rules.

8. Authorised materials only

You agree to only include code, data or other materials in a submission for the MashupAustralia contest that you have the right to use and release consist with these Contest Rules.

Most datasets that we have released for this contest have been released on a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia license, which means they can be used in this contest. You can also use material that has been released on similarly liberal terms (ie. it is in the public domain (eg. US Government materials) or released under another, compatible Creative Commons license, the Free Documentation License, the MIT license or BSD license etc.).

Please do not assume that just because data is available online or able to be scraped, that you can use it in this contest. For example, most Australian Government data is released on standard Commonwealth licensing terms that limit to your use to personal and noncommercial use in unaltered form etc. Material that is licensed under these types of terms is ineligible for use in this contest because this contest requires that you mash up material and republish it for the world to enjoy.

9. Right to remove

Submissions will appear online as quickly as possible, normally within 48 hours. Comments will be posted live, but occasionally they may not make it through our our anti-trolling and anti-spamming filters and may need to be moderated manually. In accordance with our moderation policy, we reserve the right to remove or not post any submission that reasonably appears to breach any of these rules.

10. Disclaimer

The Taskforce makes no representations or warranties of any kind, expressed or implied, including warranties of accuracy, in regard to any submissions or links published on the mashupaustralia.org website.

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless the Taskforce in full and permanently against any third party liabilities, claims, costs, expenses (including legal costs) loss or damage (including consequential loss) incurred by the Taskforce as a result of publishing any material you submit to us via the mashupaustralia.org website.