Data visualization is an emerging field of interest in many areas such as journalism, consulting or research. The abundance of digital information, and specially open and publicly available datasets, is boosting inspiration of InfoViz practitioners and enthusiast to surprise us with creative and beautiful visualizations.

In WikiSym, we have been planning the best way to promote and disseminate interest in this area, considering the advantages of open content, open datasets and open web technologies. Therefore, together with Wikimedia Foundation we decided to co-organized a challenge to ask data/information visualization experts, computational journalists, data artists and data scientists to create the most insightful visualization of open collaboration data. We will also have several partners from design, innovation, and media collaborating with us in this contest.

The rules, schedule and topic of this year’s challenge will be published very soon. A committee of recognized InfoViz experts will review all submissions to select a winner and 2 finalists, who will be able to attend WikiSym 2011 next October at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley to present their creations and receive their awards.

To learn more about this challenge, you can visit the WikiViz page on the WikiSym 2011 website, or follow us on Twitter.