$10K prize for best city data mashup

[Tyler Dukes]

Thought this might be of interest to some of the developers in our group. BuzzData is offering a $10,000 prize to the person or team to create the most convincing data mashup showing the best place in the world to live. Judging panel looks pretty impressive: Nathan Yau, of FlowingData, Hilary Mason, of bit.ly, and David Eaves, a public policy and open government expert. From the site:

Your mission: to create a new “liveability” index, using the 140 cities in the EIU’s datasets, that determines which is the best city in the world to live in, using these datasets PLUS any additional publicly available data sources that you wish to use (note: see the Contest Rules for information on using additional data). You are also required to create a visualization of the new index that you’ve created.

I wonder if the results of this contest will have more impact than than the typical top-10 lists?