What’s going on with the whole Gov 2.0 movement?

What was once a trickle of activity has turned into a flood and suddenly open government data has become the coolest thing for coders to play with since…well, since whatever they used to play with earlier in the year. Check out some of the activity below:

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So, first of all is the Mashup Australia competition running until November 13^th. Create a mashup using any of the Government data sources listed on the site and you can win up to $10,000 in prizes. Nice.

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Next, the Open Australia Foundation and Google are running a hackfest on November 7-8 to create mashups from Government data that can be found at http://data.australia.gov.au (not sure why they don’t let you use all of the data sets that Mashup Australia has).

FYI - the OpenAustralia Foundation runs OpenAustralia.org to promote parliamentary transparency making it easier for Australians to find out what their representatives are saying on their behalf.

The good thing about the hackfest is that the data sets you can use on that weekend are a subset of the data sets you can use for the Mashup Australia competition, so any project from the day can go into the running for the $10,000 Mashup Australia first prize too. Nice x 2.

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Finally, The Government 2.0 Taskforce is running a competition to find the best idea(s) for using public sector information in a nonprofit/charity setting. They’re also awarding a cash donation of $5,000 to the charity/not-for-profit organisation of the winner’s choice.

The winner will also get help from Connecting Up Australia to scope their idea as a project proposal that the Taskforce will consider funding from their “Project Fund”.

The Taskforce is promoting the use of data from Mashup Australia’s data sources, which makes sense when you consider that Mashup Australia is a Taskforce Initiative.  What that means, however, is that once again anything you do for this competition is not only in the running for the $5000 prize for your favourite NFP, but can also go into the Mashup Australia comp.   Nice x 3

Be quick on this one though – Deadline is 5pm 30th October (i.e. next Friday)