The Washington, D.C., Office of the Chief Technology Officer has announced the winner of the second edition of the Apps for Democracy contest, which challenges citizens to make open source applications that access data held by the government. The winning entry was an iPhone program in which users can submit 311 service requests to the district government. The application also interfaces with Facebook.

The application's development team of Victor Shilo, Roman Zolin and Andrey Andreev won the $10,000 first prize. The contest was co-sponsored by iStrategyLabs.

Chris Willey, Washington, D.C.'s interim chief technology officer, recently told Government Technology that this version of Apps for Democracy, which began in May, was divided into steps.

"We called this one the Apps for Democracy Community Edition," Willey said. "The first 30 days, we sent field teams out to talk to residents directly and ask them two questions: One, what problems do you think technology can help solve? Second, what would be the perfect platform to get citizen requests to government?

"After that finished, we took all those insights and we gave them to the developers and said, 'Based on this [data] and based on our open 311 API [application programming interface] -- which is a way for applications to directly access our call center database -- now go and build applications."

Video: Chris Willey, interim CTO for Washington D.C., says the district may try to create a new model for acquiring software.

Aside from the prize money, the winning application will be supported by an additional development grant, an optional perk stipulated by the contest's rules. The iPhone program will be "seamlessly" combined with a Facebook application, and eventually rebranded, according to the contest Web site.

According to a demonstration video of the 311 iPhone app, users can send in service requests for things like abandoned bicycles or potholes. They also can post their service requests to Facebook, where friends are able to track and comment on them. The iPhone program also includes a "hall-of fame" feature that posts the Facebook identities of those who most frequently use the 311 app. Users can also submit service requests directly on the Facebook site on a separate application, and the team plans to build in functionality that would allow users to send in photos.

Apps for Democracy was the brainchild of former Washington, D.C., chief technology officer Vivek Kundra, who joined the Obama administration this year to become the nation's first federal CIO.

Last year's winning applications were DC Historic Tours, a Google Maps mash-up that plots routes for walking tours of Washington, D.C., and marks points of interest with Flickr photographs and Wikipedia excerpts; and iLive.at, another mash-up powered by Google that pinpoints demographic data and locations of schools, banks, parks, transportation lines, recent crime reports and