Show Us a Better Way

What would you create with public information?

Ever been frustrated that you can't find out something that ought to be easy to find?  Ever been baffled by league tables or 'performance indicators'?  Do you think that better use of public information could improve health, education, justice or society at large?

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government's behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here. 

To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition.  Rest assured, this competition does not include personal information about people.

We're confident that you'll have more and better ideas than we ever will. You don't have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.

Go on, Show Us A Better Way.

Prototypes - How to go about winning that new £20,000

As you may have noticed we launched a new strand to our competition last week - a £20,000 cash prize for people working up prototypes of people's ideas. Some of you may well be in the position that I was in a couple of weeks ago - completely enthused by the ideas, but not quite sure how to go about developing them into reality.

This is a quick post to draw some of the sites and resources I have found to your attention. It is a little skewed towards mapping (or GIS), but this reflects the majority of the ideas submitted so far.

There will invariably be useful sites I have missed from this list. Please put any new sites in the comments.

Where to start

• The Wikipedia definition of a mashup
• A programmable web HowTo
• The IBM Many Eyes tool - Contains some inspiration and ideas on presentation (as well as being a useful tool)

General development frameworks

• Google Code - Google's Homepage for web developers. Offers hosting, tools, etc
• Microsoft Popfly - Microsoft's graphical application generator
• Yahoo pipes - A Yahoo project giving similar, but slightly different functionality to popfly
• PiggyBank - A tool created by MIT Smilie project to turn firefox into a mashup platform

Useful tools

• Firefox Web Developer add-on - Simple add-on that is immensely useful when tryin to work out why sites do or don't work.
• Notepad ++ - Simple text editor that displays code in the correct colours (really useful)

Tips and tricks (worth a read even if not technical)

• http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/ - Unofficial site with a wealth of interesting map 'mashups'
• http://mapperz.blogspot.com/ - Map and GIS News finding blog
• http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/ - Official Google maps blog
• http://www.programmableweb.com/ - A portal for the 'mashup' community. Contains news, examples, etc

Disclaimer: I found these sites useful, but they are not an Official endorsement by the British Government. Have a look at them, make your own mind up and give us feedback in the comments

New £20,000 prize for 'prototypes'

THe second half of the annocuncement this morning is that we have a new prize! Your ideas have so impressed Michael Wills, the Ministry of Justice minister, that he has stumped up £20,000 of his department's money to fund a prize for work up models of your idea.

If you are a keen developer who sees all the great idea and is itching to take them forward - now you can. We will be awarding prizes the extra £20,000 cash to the best implementations or prototypes we can find! We know there are some of you out there who have already been doing this, now is the time for those who have been mulling it over to dive in.

If you are an ideas man who wouldn't know javascript from php you should continue to submit your idea! We will develop the best ideas with our £20,000 fund.

Over the next few days we will be posting on some of the tools there are for development and highlighting some of the places you can go for support. In the meantime all the public information you need is here; the ideas are here.

Let the development begin!

www.buildingdemocracy.co.uk - new competition from the Ministry of Justice

The Ministry of Justice have launched a new competition today to find projects that will help reconnect people with the democratic process. In their words:

"We want more people to participate in our democracy, and we want you to come up with ways to make this happen."

We have been working closely with the Ministry of Justice over the past few weeks to share our experience of running something like this online. We are delighted that they have chosen to go down this route and launch our sister site: www.buildingdemocracy.co.uk

They have 10 ~£15,000 grants to give away to the projects that will reignite people's passion for democracy or the democratic process. What are you waiting for dive in!

Watch this space for further announcements later on today ....