Shiny apps are a great way to communicate your data science insights with striking, dynamic, interactive visualizations and reports. Over the years, we have loved interacting with the Shiny community and loved seeing and sharing all the exciting apps, dashboards, and interactive documents Shiny developers have produced. We also love seeing Shiny developers openly sharing their code and process for building apps so that others can learn from them and improve their apps. In order to encourage more sharing, as well as to recognize the many outstanding ways people work with Shiny, we are happy to announce the first contest to recognize outstanding Shiny applications!

Criteria

Apps will be judged based on technical merit and/or on artistic achievement (e.g., UI design). We recognize that some apps may excel in one of these categories and some in the other, and some in both. Evaluation will be done keeping this in mind.

Evaluation will also take into account the feedback/reaction of other users in the submission posts in RStudio Community.

Requirements

There are only a few requirements to enter this contest:

Your app should be in an RStudio Cloud project.

Your app should be deployed on shinyapps.io.

Any data and code used in the app should be publicly available and/or openly licensed.

If you’re new to RStudio Cloud and shinyapps.io, you can create an account for free. Additionally, you can find instructions specific to this contest here and find the general RStudio Cloud guide here.

Need inspiration?

Want to participate but need some inspiration to get started building an app? Take a look at the Tidy Tuesdays datasets and feel free to use any of them as your starting point. If you’re just getting started with Shiny, the learning resources at http://shiny.rstudio.com/tutorial/ might also come in handy.

Note that the app(s) you submit do not have to be based on data analyses. They could also be anything from an app for teaching to scaling a recipe for making eggnog.

Browsing the Shiny Gallery and the Shiny User Showcase might also provide lots of inspiration.

Awards

Honorable Mention Prizes:

One year of shinyapps.io Basic plan

One RStudio t-shirt

Runner Up Prizes:

All awards above, plus

All hex/RStudio stickers we can find

Any number of RStudio t-shirts, books, and mugs (worth up to $200)

Grand Prizes:

One in each category (Novice and Open)

All awards above, and

Special & persistent recognition by RStudio in the form of a winners page, and a badge that’ll be publicly visible on your RStudio Community profile

Half-an-hour one-on-one with a representative from the RStudio Shiny team for Q&A and feedback

The names and work of all winners will be highlighted in the Shiny User Showcase and we will announce them on RStudio’s social platforms, including community.rstudio.com (unless the winner prefers not to be mentioned).

Of course, the main reward is knowing that you’ve helped future app developers!

This year’s competition will be judged Joe Cheng and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel. Winners will be invited to serve as judges in future Shiny contests.

Submission

To participate in this contest, please follow the link https://rstd.io/shiny-contest-2019 to create a new post in RStudio Community (you will be asked to sign up if you don’t have an account). The post title should start with “Shiny contest submission:“, followed by a short title to describe your application (e.g., “a Shiny app for mapping electric scooters in LA”). The post may describe features and highlights of the application, include screenshots and links to live examples and source repositories, and briefly explain key technical details (how the customization or extension was achieved).

In addition, the post should include

link to an RStudio Cloud project with everything required to run your app (scripts, data, images, css, etc.), and

link to the deployed app on shinyapps.io.

There is no limit on the number of entries one participant can submit. Please submit as many as you wish!

The deadline for the submission is March 8, 2019. You are welcome to either submit your existing Shiny apps or create one in two months! We will announce winners and their submissions in this blog, RStudio Community, and also on Twitter before March 22, 2019.

We’re looking forward to your submissions!