Inspire and innovate.

​Background

EPIC created the Water Data Prize to inspire new approaches to sharing information about water quality that help all consumers make informed decisions about whether their water is safe to drink. More than 30 organizations and individuals in the water sector submitted entries to the 2020 Water Data Prize. EPIC awarded prizes to five submissions, each of which were creative, easy-to-implement strategies and tools that better communicated information on water quality and health risks to the public. The results are available in our report, Re-envisioning Water Quality Reports, and EPIC continues to work with utilities and regulators to implement the ideas presented in this first Water Data Prize.

New federal regulations regarding lead in drinking water were finalized in June 2021 and went into effect in December 2021; compliance on various aspects will happen over the next three years. Several changes in regulations will dictate how water utilities test water, share contaminant information, and collect information on lead water service line locations. Other requirements will affect the replacement of these toxic lead pipes. Some states have already adopted similar or stronger regulations.

2021 Water Data Prize

This year’s prize encouraged designers, communication enthusiasts, technologists, community advocates, engineers, students and entrepreneurs to imagine new and cost-effective ways to address information and data needs created by the new regulations.

Our award categories cover four main areas to support the new regulations:

  • Inventory: Innovative tools to predict or determine the location of lead water pipes and create an up-to-date inventory

  • Mapping: Easy-to-understand and interactive maps of of lead water pipes to make this information useful to the public

  • Equity: Criteria, decision-making tools or visualizations that support more equitable lead water pipe identification or replacement programs

  • Communications: Simple tools and visualizations that will successfully give water consumers useful, actionable information on lead violations, lead sampling results, lead service line replacement status updates, or health information on lead in drinking water

What you need to know

Prize
There is a $100,000 prize pool:

  • $50,000 for Water Data Prize Overall Winner

  • $10,000 per Award Category

  • $10,000 for Wildcard Stellar Entry

Our intent is to share the best submissions with the municipalities of the Lead-Free Water Challenge, the Environmental Protection Agency, state water regulators, interested water utilities, consumer advocacy groups, and trade associations. The 2020 Water Data Prize demonstrated that these awards can inspire results that motivate change in how water quality information is communicated, and we will push to make that happen again in the 2021 Prize.

Judging Criteria
Submissions are judged by an expert panel along the following criteria:

  • Health: How does the submission make it easy for the average person to understand the data and information related to toxic lead water pipes?

  • Priorities: Creative ways in which the submission makes information on the most important information stand out.

  • Degree of Accessibility: Submission promotes accessibility, ADA compliance, and multiple languages.

  • Level of Engagement: Submission incorporates design features that invite customers to learn more and engage with the data.

  • Innovation: Submission uses an emerging technology or an established technology used in a novel way.

  • Wowza: Submission that offers most dramatic improvement compared to current standards of prize category

  • Ease of Implementation: submission incorporates design features or technology that could be easily adopted by utilities at a low cost.


We encourage the use of open-source tools to design your resources, but understand the limitations and will not penalize the use of proprietary softwares and tools. Submissions can include but are not limited to websites, interactive online tools, slide decks, .pdf, or other purely visual or static submissions.

Rules and Eligibility
The Prize is open to anyone age 18 or older participating as an individual or as a team. No specific qualifications or prior expertise is required. Prize organizers encourage individuals and non-expert teams to compete and propose new solutions.

The prize will be open to all - academia, water utilities, data tech startups, municipalities, engineering firms, technology companies, communications firms, and community-based organizations.

Teams must have at least one US-based member and be able to provide an EIN or SSN if your intent is to be eligible for one of the awards. Submissions must be primarily made in English, but may additionally be in other languages.

Intellectual Property Rights
Prize winners will retain all intellectual property rights, i.e., software, source code, marks, methodology, techniques, expression and grant EPIC a license to share the visual and interactive elements of the submission with utilities, state and federal agencies, and other interested stakeholders via webinars, reports, media communications, and other means of outreach and dissemination.

The application window for the 2021 Water Data Prize has closed.