Got hacking skills? DonorsChoose.org wants you to put them to good use by tackling a trove of its newly released data. It's all part of a high-profile campaign, "Hacking Education," designed to get coders to improve education in America.

Entrants in seven categories will be judged by luminaries such as Teach for America's Wendy Kopp, former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein and Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington. Winners will receive a variety of prizes including gadgets, gift cards and tickets to O'Reilly conferences. The grand prize will be handed out by Stephen Colbert, a long-time supporter of DonorsChoose.

DonorsChoose is an online education charity that allows teachers to post funding requests for classroom projects. The requests range from grants for new pencils to new computers. The recipients are required to write a cost report showing how each dollar was spent. Most send photos and hand-written letters from the students.

For this contest, the site is sharing more than 10 years of data, along with an API. Contestants will use these to develop apps or conduct analyses. The central question for the judges: Which entry has the greatest potential to engage the public and affect education?

The database contains more than 300,000 classroom projects and more than 1 million contributions. You can see search queries performed by donors, the subject area and resource type of each project, teacher affiliation, and poverty rate of each school. DonorsChoose has inspired $80 million in giving since its inception in 2000.

Essentially, the Hacking Education competition is crowdsourcing an analytics team for the non-profit. Each submission will help contextualize different facets of DonorsChoose's massive data set. The site has posted some prompts for the competition that get at this kind of analysis. For example: "Invent a way for people to engage with classroom project requests before they're ready to open their wallets. About 2% of visitors to DonorsChoose.org make a donation. What can the other 98% of visitors do for fun?"

Ultimately, it's a win-win. The non-profit gets better at donating to good causes, and users are rewarded for their smart ideas. Even if you don't know how to code or create an app, you can head over to the data center and download everything you ever wanted to know about DonorsChoose.

What do you think of non-profits making their internal data public? Is it a good practice even if there isn't a competition on the line? Sound off in the comments.