Hi everyone,

I'm sharing this on behalf of an old friend and colleague now at the Institute of the Future - it's an open source competition, the Digital Open, with great prizes and an interesting premise.

Best,

Daniel

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THE DIGITAL OPEN

The Digital Open is a an online tech community and collaborative competition for youth around the world, ages 17 and under. The Institute for the Future, Sun, and Boing Boing are partnering on this competition, and they say "The future is yours to make! We want to hear your ideas, inventions and plans for changing the world through technology."

There are 8 categories for your ideas:

Open Code: Sharing software / code that can be built upon by other kids and engineers. (ex: your own programming language, an online collaborative art project)

Open Community: Using technology to get your community to interact in new ways as citizens and advocates. (ex: a collaborative you set up to make changes in your school or local government, a mobile app to connect with other young activists)

Open Discovery: Investigating the science of the world around us, or understanding our own health and well-being. (ex: experiments / investigations that used an "open" data collection, new solutions to health and nutrition problems.)

Open Earth: Improving the health and well-being of our planet. (ex: alternative energy inventions, carbon footprint measures, eco-friendly transportation solutions, organic gardening / farming process.)

Open Entrepreneurs: Creating and launching a new business or organization. (ex: an online business plan for a new nonprofit / non-governmental organization, or an up-and-running business or organization, or tools to help existing ones run better)

Open Gear: Making physical things—gadgets, devices, robots, toys, etc.--that others can make too based on your designs. (ex: a sweet robot that helps you take out the trash, a creative hack of an existing device)

Open Media: Bringing out the artist or creative within you to make something visual, digital, musical, or tactile in communication, information, and arts. (ex: new ways to create, visualize, collect, or discover media, or pieces of art)

Open Play: Brainstorming, designing, and sharing new, engaging ways of having fun. (ex: an alternate reality game, or any project using the internet, cards, cell phones, cameras, and real-world actions to play in a new way.)

Contest rules (in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Chinese, and Russian) are online at digitalopen.org . Winners in each category get a prize pack (valued at $1000) and will be featured on Boing Boing. The contest deadline is August 22.

This would have been nice to know about...... 2 years ago...... :'(

this
*weeps in a corner*

Thanks Dan, you've just made me feel very old. lol j/k. I'm quite creative, so others can take solace that I will not be one of their nightmares in this competition.

I would have totally done it, but I'm too old

TO THE TIME MACHINE

Oh wait that actually wouldn't help me in this situation

Fiddlesticks

In the future everything will fly and levitate, food will be in pill form and a cybertronic Nixon will roam the land harvesting spinal fluid to keep the diabolic machinations which have become his very body working.

Oh and it turns out science doesn't work.

unpinned b/c dead has passed. be interesting to see results, if someone is less lazy than i am.