PredictifyMe CEO Rob Burns asked, “If you are trick-or-treating at Halloween, and get a Snickers bar, what would you assume about those candy-givers?” Turns out they are most probably a Republican.

And based on a combination of open and private data, his firm found that lollipops are in turn the most highly correlated Halloween sweets with Democratic households.

That was the flavor of the event tonight at the 3rd Annual NC Datapalooza finale in Raleigh at the Red Hat Annex. We also heard from the new Cary CIO Nicole Raimundo, who made an appeal for more storytelling in open data world, and Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon, who spoke of key tech trends that data is enabling.

And of course, the demos from the three NC Datapalooza finalists.

The Results

(1) Grand Prize Winner: Open511 wants to aggregate and facilitate road closure from multiple municipalities to make data easily consumable by the apps we use like Google Maps/Waze, TomTom (who uses those anymore?), and others.

(2) Best use of ESRI Technology Prize Winner: PointsOfNote, with 10 yr. old Gavin Clark and father Will Clark, makes historical cultural markers data engaging through application with routing capabilities and pre-packaged tours for economic development and tourism boards.

(3) BernieSez wants to help moneyball the criminal justic system. This finalist has done the hard work of making 35,000,000 records received on CD useable and analyzable. They lambasted the openness of NC Court system, then after analyzing 44,000 misdemeanor marijuana arrest records, showed which NC towns have the most bias of arrests of African-Americans for this crime, and which judges are.most and least friendly to African-Americans with these misdemeanors. Read how it works.

BernieSez could be a great partner for phase 2 of the Code for Durham project to visualize NC traffic stop data with partner Southern Coalition of Social Justice to be demoed by our own co-captain Colin Copeland of Caktus Group in Oakland next week at the Code for America Summit.