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UK Government Offers New £20,000 Mashup Prize

Andres Ferrate, August 12th, 2008 Comments(0)

Last month reported on how the UK government has established the Power of Information Task Force to lead a massive data sharing effort aimed at fostering social and economic progress by enabling widespread access to government data.

As part of the task force’s efforts, ShowUsABetterWay.com was set up as a resource for public involvement and suggestions for ideas on how to use the newly available government data. You may or may not remember that this effort includes a competition with a £20,000 prize fund that will be distributed for the best ideas on how to use the data.

It now appears that the task force is gaining momentum, as the Ministry of Justice has announced an additional £20,000 prize available for ‘prototypes.’ This announcement comes in the wake of a previous announcement for www.buildingdemocracy.co.uk, a new competition from the Ministry of Justice. According to the web site:

Now we want to support projects that you will run to help people to address public issues and influence government.

If you can think of a way to get people talking, we’d like to hear it. We have £150,000 available to develop about ten proposals.

ShowUsABetterWay.com includes some updates on public data that is already available as well as some of the latest ideas.

All together, that’s over £190,000 available in prize money for keen and motivated developers interested in contributing to the UK government’s efforts while potentially gaining some additional income in the process.

It’s great to see that the UK government is expanding its data sharing efforts while incentivizing public participation for applications that are mutually beneficial. We’d love to hear from any developers out there that have submited mashups that use some of the new APIs released by the UK government.

Our API directory now includes 16 UK-related APIs, including entries for the NHS API, the Office for National Statistics API and the Tell Them What You Think API.