Soft­ware de­vel­op­ers from Trinidad and To­ba­go, Ja­maica, Mar­tinique, Cu­ba, Suri­name, Guade­loupe, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic and Guyana will this month com­pete to build so­lu­tions to so­cial prob­lems us­ing open da­ta.

The com­pe­ti­tion is part of an up­com­ing an­nu­al event, host­ed by the De­part­ment of Com­put­ing and In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy of The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine, in part­ner­ship with the Slash/Roots Foun­da­tion.The Caribbean Open Da­ta Con­fer­ence and Code Sprint, which will take place on April 11 and 12, is a re­gion­al tech­nol­o­gy event, fo­cused on open da­ta, soft­ware in­no­va­tion, and tech­nol­o­gy trends. De­scribed as the largest tech­nol­o­gy con­fer­ence in the re­gion, the event at­tract­ed 900 at­ten­dees and 120 reg­is­tered de­vel­op­ers from five is­lands in 2012.

This year al­so marks the in­tro­duc­tion of the Caribbean App Chal­lenge, a ini­tia­tive that aims to sup­port par­tic­i­pat­ing teams, as they de­vel­op their so­lu­tions in­to ma­ture ap­pli­ca­tions and start-ups. A state­ment from UWI said it was hop­ing through the event to add to the pool of soft­ware so­lu­tions that can have Caribbean-wide im­pact.The con­fer­ence this year seeks to con­tin­ue rais­ing aware­ness of the ben­e­fits of Caribbean-re­lat­ed open da­ta, recog­nise the im­por­tance and po­ten­tial of cen­sus da­ta, high­light the op­por­tu­ni­ties of da­ta jour­nal­ism and ex­plore the po­ten­tial de­vel­op­ment im­pact of the re­cent­ly signed Open Gov­ern­ment Part­ner­ship in T&T.

Ad­mis­sion to the Caribbean Open Da­ta Con­fer­ence and Code Sprint is free and the gen­er­al pub­lic can reg­is­ter at: de­v­catt.eventbrite.com. To find out more, please vis­it the of­fi­cial con­fer­ence web­site: http://de­vel­op­ing­caribbean.org.