Data viz savvy? Win a trip to Cartagena

The U.N. Development Program is sponsoring round-trip flights to attend a data revolution conference in Cartagena, Colombia, for those who come up with the most artistic, original and useful data visualizations of its human development data sets.

Apart from the free airfare and participation in the Cartagena Data Festival, which will take place April 20-22, the finalists will get three days of accommodation, certificates and small local gifts.

The Human Development Visualization Competition is a follow-up to a similar event in 2011, and the goal is to have more rounds in the future, Eleonore Fournier-Tombs, online communication manager of the UNDP Human Development Report Office, told Devex.

“No doubt that we'd like to continue doing this because it's a way to promote innovation, and it's very inspiring for us to see the way that people look at our data,” Fournier-Tombs said.

The competition is designed to allow for targeted contribution by the users of UNDP’s development indices. The agency has long received unsolicited submissions of human development data visualizations; last year, one user developed and submitted a mobile app for Apple devices.

“Instead of contributing kind of in a vacuum, now they have a purpose … and they have a prize,” Fournier-Tombs said, adding that it’s also a way for UNDP to thank the human development data users for “spending so much time on our data and thinking about our data as well.”

UNDP HDRO is working on a communication plan to publicize the work of the finalists, including putting them up on Tumblr, which hosts user contributions of data visualizations.

All entries for the Human Development Visualization Competition must be in by March 20. Depending on the quality of the submissions, UNDP HDRO will choose between three and five finalists.

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