Stubblog

Give it in little projects to the little guys.

As I’ve said in the past, government should concentrate on providing data and let it’s citizens build the sites they want out of that.

Some would say that the sites built wont cover the needs of everybody, but then how is that different from today?

Over the weekend a bunch of people got together for Hack The Government Day and proved what can be done when data is free, using screen scraping, they built projects against the data held at companies house, the job center, an API for searching schools, a site for finding a local dentist, a site to review your MPs voting record and a site that took Sport England’s Active Places and improved it using Google Maps. Active Places was developed using £5 million of lottery money.

The sooner this kind of data becomes free, the sooner we start to get these kind of sites available.