On Friday night, a packed room of eager potential entrepreneurs, developers and curious citizens watched US CTO Todd Park and Bill Eggers kick off Startup Weekend DC in Microsoft’s offices in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Watching @ZacharyCohn kick off @StartupWeekend in DC. @wdeggers & @todd_park on deck. instagr.am/p/L6bff4JyBd/

— Alex Howard (@digiphile) June 15, 2012

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsPark brought his customary energy and geeky humor to his short talk, pitching the assembled crowd on using open government data in their ideas.

“America is giving you billions &billions of dollars of data for free”-@todd_park radar.oreilly.com/2012/06/mhealt… #startupweekend twitter.com/digiphile/stat…

— Alex Howard (@digiphile) June 15, 2012

Park wants to inject open data as a “fuel” into the economy. After talking about the success of the Health Data Initiative and the Health Datapalooza, he shared a series of websites were aspiring entrepreneurs could find data to use:

• Healthdata.gov
• Education.data.gov
• Energy.data.gov
• openei.org
• Safety.data.gov
• Bluebuttondata.org

Park also made an “ask” of the attendees of Startup Weekend DC that I haven’t heard from many government officials: he requested that if they A) use the data and/or B) if they run into any trouble accessing it, to let him know.

“If you had a hard time or found a particular restful API moving, let me know,” he said. “It helps us improve our performance.” And then he gave out his email address at the White House Executive Office of the President, as he did at SXSW Interactive in Austin in March of this year. Asking the public for feedback on data quality — particularly entrepreneurs and developers — and providing contact information to do so is, to put it bluntly, something every city and state official that has stood up and open data platform could and should be doing. In this context, the US CTO has set a notable example for the country.

Examples of startups, gap filling and civic innovation

Following Park, author and Deloitte consultant Bill Eggers talked about innovative startups and the public sector. I’ve embedded video of his talk below:

Eggers cited three different startups in his talk: Recycle Bank, Avego and Kaggle.

1) The outcome of Recycle Bank‘s influence was a 19-fold increase in recycling in some cities from gamification, said Eggers. The startup now has 3 million members and is now setting its sights on New York City.

2) The real-time ridesharing provided by Avego holds the promise to hugely reduce traffic congestion, said Eggers. According to the stats he cited, 80% of people on the road are currently driving in cars by themselves. Avego has raised tens of millions of dollars to try to better optimize transportation.

3) Anthony Goldbloom found a hole in the big data market at Kaggle, said Eggers, where they’re matching data challenges with data scientists. There now some 19,000 registered data scientists in the Kaggle database.

Eggers cited the success of a competition to map dark matter on Kaggle, a problem that had had millions spent on it. The results of open innovation here were better than science had been able to achieve prior to the competition. Kaggle has created a market out of writing better algorithms.

I’d posit @wdeggers‘ book williameggers.com/books/45363902… relates to the US CTO’s work: http://rad instagr.am/p/L6cCXGpyB2/

— Alex Howard (@digiphile) June 15, 2012

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAfter Eggers spoke, the organizers of Startup Weekend explained how the rest of the weekend would proceed and asked attendees to pitch their ideas. One particular idea, for this correspondent, stood out, primarily because of the young fellows pitching it:

These 4 11-year-olds want to work with Kinect developers to build games for science education. @sw_dc #startupweekend twitter.com/digiphile/stat…

— Alex Howard (@digiphile) June 16, 2012