Army Holds Contest for Application Development

On Monday, March 1, the U.S. Army launched an application-development contest called “Apps for the Army.” The employees (both soldiers and Army civilian employees) who develop the best software will receive monetary awards from a pool of $30,000 of prize money.

According to InformationWeek, the Army CIO Jeff Sorenson said, “We’re building a culture of collaboration among our Army community to encourage smarter, better, and faster technical solutions to meet operational needs.”

The contest entries will be judged on the following six different criteria:

1) Usefulness to warfighters or business users

2) Intuitive usability

3) Appeal over current or past approaches to executing the same tasks

4) Inventiveness

5) Likelihood to have an effect on missions

6) Viability

The contest will only allow the first 100 submissions, and participants must have an army login. There will be a total of 40 winning submissions and these winners will be recognized later this year at an Army IT conference.