This past September the Big Data / Data Science Meetup in Cluj-Napoca, Romania held a workshop titled “How to think in MapReduce” that used GDELT to explore working with large datasets inside of Apache Hadoop.  This time they are hosting their first BigData/DataScience Contest and are asking meetup participants "to take these GDELT datasets and to do crazy things with them."  Example ideas include "tracking the spread of terrorist groups," "figure out whether the kidnapping of 200 Nigerian girls was a predictable event," and "heatmaps showing Crimea turn into a hotspot of activity leading up to ex-Ukrainian Viktor Yanukovych’s ouster and Russia’s subsequent invasion."

They've even put together a Romanian-language YouTube video offering a quick tutorial on working with the GDELT Analysis Service.

We're so incredibly excited to see the amazing projects to come out of this competition!