The terms of this competition were antithetical to most consumer internet business theses. The three that discouraged me from wanting to participate:
1) hard limit of 100,000 users. Not only is this a massive number to hit in such a small market (the combined population of the Baltics is 6.9 million -- 100,000 is nearly 1.5%), but there's no common language between these three states. I'd have to create localized versions of my service in Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, and Russian in order to have the slightest chance of reaching that 100,000 users number.
2) The service must make use of public data. I can attest to the fact that the Estonian government does a very good job of making statistics available. But I don't know that they provide an API for third-party applications to access those statistics, and I'd be surprised if the Latvian or Lithuanian governments do. Also, the forced use of public data limits my options for business plans. If I'm going to spend the time to build a business, I want to focus all of my time on the core feature set, not accommodating some capricious rule from a contest.
3) "Main criteria for ranking the participants will be the number of active users, *with secondary criteria likelihood to save lives, value proposition in terms of saving govt budget and auditability of the user engagement*." So now my cool consumer application must help government accountants cut costs or "save lives". At this point, my business mandate has been restricted to the point that I'm basically building this app solely to win this contest. Is 20,000 USD enough incentive to build something I'm not passionate about?

No app engineer is going to want to work under the constraints of this contest for the opportunity to win 20,000 USD when she has other viable ideas to execute upon -- the opportunity cost is too high (certainly higher than 20,000). The only people who would have the time to undertake this sort of contest -- with such restrictive stipulations on public data reliance and application purpose -- are college students, so why not tailor the contest to them? Either that, or relax the terms and make the ultimate goal to be 30,000 users in the Baltic states.

Hi - Why don't you include Switzerland as one of the Baltics ?
This would...

1. Double the population base for the competition.
2. Add 4'000 meter peaks so people "aim higher".
3. Make using 4 to 5 languages each day seem normal.
4. Add multi-lingual e-gov as normal.
5. Add our too-many-ideas-and-nowhere-to-go to your too-many-ideas-and-nowhere-to-go.
6. Add some hungry contestants for whom, unlike many condescending geeks today, $20k is great money.

I'm sure we could all do it together - let's jump into a hacker-bus and tour your lovely capital cities, do a multi-flashmob venturethon and for sure get a fun project moving real fast.

An off-the-wall spin like this gets your competition media visibility AND would get every EU TV sending cameras to film how the Baltics randomly friended another country just like on Facebook (and aren't these lovely countries where you want to spend your next vacation ?)

Yeah we'll need a brand-name, lots of video-game imagery, music, emotion, lots of Y-gen and Z-gen and Jackass-gen and Boomer-gen, kids, retirees, and mums participating, political and media backing, multipliers in every village, etc etc to get the 100k people, but heck it's doable. Ending with a huge online/offline distributed party in the summer.

We're all small can-do countries - why always wait for the big countries to invent the world ?

Let's show 'em - who's in ?
Mike