Winners of Mozilla Open Data Competition announced

The winners of the Mozilla Open Data Visualization competition “How Do People Use Firefox” have been announced. The competition attracted 32 entries, each visualizing an aspect of data collected in the Mozilla Test Pilot program to reveal insights about how people use the popular open-source browser Firefox.

I was honoured to be asked to participate in the judging of this competition, and I was quite impressed by the calibre of the submissions. The entries ranged from broad-ranging interactive applications to query and visualize the Test Pilot data on demand, to targeted visualizations of specific behaviours revealed in the data, to fun infographics highlighting interesting nuggets from the data set. 

Congratulations go in particular to the winner, James Fiedler, for his custom interactive application comparing the behavior of survey respondents to participants in the Test Pilot program as a whole — a tool that effectively addresses a very important comparison in the data (especially if the Mozilla designers were to draw conclusions from the survey data alone). I’d also like to give a special shout-out to finalist Tom Haynes, creator of this elegant and succinct chart of a week in the lives of Firefox users:

Tom created the chart above using SQL, Python, R and Illustrator. In fact, one aspect of the competition that really jumped out at me as I was reviewing the entries was how large the ecosystem for visualization tools was: every entrant seemed to use a different combination of tools. Since this is an R blog though, I’d also like to highlight a few of the other entries that also used R for their visualizations:

• Tieming Ji, User Type and Web Activity Analysis
• David Ouyang, Demographics of Private Browsing Mode and Professionals at Work
• Chulki Lee & Travis Yoo, How Do People Use Bookmarks?
• Diederik van Liere & David Eaves, Firefox Plugin Memory Consumption (I really loved the application of statistical modelling in this one)
• Christian Kreibich, Browser usage over the course of a day

Congratulations go to all the participants for a job well done. If you’ve got a few minutes, browse all the entries for some other great visualizations.

Blog of Metrics: Mozilla Open Data Competition – Announcing the Winners