On President Obama’s first full day in office, he called for recommendations to make the Federal Government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. Through the Open Government Initiative, the U.S. Government recently made available a rich variety of Federal datasets via Data.gov with the specified purpose of increasing public access to high value, machine readable datasets
generated by the Federal Government.

As part of First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move initiative, the USDA's Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services recently launched a
multi-phased challenge called the Innovations for Health. The first part of this, the Apps for Healthy Kids competition, is a call to American entrepreneurs, software developers, and students to use the recently released USDA Nutrition Dataset
to create innovative, fun, and engaging applications and games that
encourage children directly or through their parents to make more
nutritious food choices and to be more physically active.

Subsequent parts of Innovations for Health will include producing motivating public service announcements (PSAs) (Video Challenge) and creating healthful recipes to be used in schools (Recipe Challenge). Details of these will be announced at a later date.

For more on the Apps for Healthy Kids challenge, click here.