Never mind the World Cup, here are the Hack Warwickshire results

After 3 hours locked in the War Room of Warwickshire County Council, we are delighted to announce that the winners of our inaugural Hack Warwickshire competition are:

 Lewis Wagner with his Warwickshire Library New Releases hack

 and

 Matt Hawthorne with his Warwickshire Wired Hack

Congratulations should also go to Karen Ramsey-Smith for her great idea and Chris Heilmann for his excellent use of Yahoo! YQL, who are both the recipients of Apple iPod Shuffles.

 The standard of entries was great and our judges were all very impressed with what they were looking at. Dave Coplin, of Microsoft, said

“My goodness, there’s some good stuff in there”

Thanks to everyone who got involved, we’re delighted with the outcome and, remember, there will be more opportunities to Hack Warwickshire soon.

Extra Time to Hack Warwickshire

Due to the increased numbers of datasets loaded onto our Open Data site in the last week, we have decided to extend the deadline of the competition to Friday 2nd July 2010 at 5pm.

This is to give entrants more time to look at the new data and either enhance their current entry, or even build a new one.

A Surge of Open Data

In the run-up to the last week of the competition we have some great new datasets to play with.

Ageing Population

Child Poverty Issues

Health Deprivation

Job Seekers Allowance Claimants

Jobs Growth

Relative Age Profile

Skills and Qualifications

and to top it all off …

Warwickshire Super Output Areas to help you do something clever with all of the new data.

With a week left to go, there’s still time for you to get your paws on an iPad or an iPod shuffle.

Kate’s Great Idea

So it would appear the downside to running a competition is that I’m not allowed to enter. Well, that doesn’t mean I can’t tell the world about my fantastic idea for an application – Walk This Way, Talk This Way (but not to strangers). Have a read, and see if you can do better by sending your idea to opendata@warwickshire.gov.uk. We need your ideas, and who knows, it might give some clever developer the inspiration to build what you want.

The reality of my application is still not quite possible until we can launch the locations of zebra, pelican and pedestrian crossings – they are currently OS-derived datasets. But with the rate at which the Ordnance Survey are freeing stuff up, this could be possible by the end of the year (nudge, nudge).

New Hack Warwickshire Prizes in Association with Yahoo!

Very excited to announce that we will have two more categories for prizes in our Hack Warwickshire competition. Both have been made possible by the marvellous people at the Yahoo! Developer Network.

In each case these prizes are open to everyone eligible to enter Hack Warwickshire, whether a member of the public or a member of staff at Warwickshire County Council. The two new categories are:

Best Hack Warwickshire entry using Yahoo! Query Language

As the title suggests so succinctly we will be awarding a prize to the entry that makes the best use of YQL, best described as “Pipes for the command line”. Dveelopers will find it super-easy to use – have a play at http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/ or check out the documentation at http://developer.yahoo.com/yql. The winner of this category will receive an iPod shuffle.

Hack Warwickshire: Give us an idea

If you have a great idea for an application but are not a technical person we have a new category in Hack Warwickshire to get you involved. Send your ideas for applications, web sites or mash ups that you think should be built using Warwickshire data and the best entry will win an iPod shuffle, once again kindly supplied by Yahoo!

To enter, send us a description of your idea to opendata@warwickshire.gov.uk –  feel free to include as much or as little detail as you like, pictures/diagrams welcome. We will publish them on this site on the Give us an idea page and the prize winning entry will be chosen during the Hack Warwickshire event on 9th July at WCC headquarters. Your idea needs to be with us by the end of Friday 2nd of July.

Three Weeks Left To Hack Warwickshire

There are still three more weeks to submit your entry to Hack Warwickshire, the closing date is Friday 25th June – still plenty of time to develop an all conquering example of how Warwickshire’s Open Data can lead to new and innovative ways of working as well as winning yourself a brand new Apple Ipad.

There are plenty of examples to check out on our App Gallery page – so have a look, get inspired and sign up at our open data community to see what else is going on.

Just to keep things interesting we are going to be opening up two more categories in the competition – further announcements today.

The Political Mashup and Open Data

According to Wikipedia, there are many types of mashup. Now, thanks to David Cameron and Nick Clegg there is a new type of mashup – the Political Mashup (if I could copyright that, I would). 

I’ve been having tremendous fun reading “The Coalition: Programme for Government” this morning with my Open Data glasses on looking for more carrots and sticks to “encourage” data out of WCC. It seems Dave and Nick have heard my furious swearing after yet another unsuccessful phone call with one of our data huggers (that’s what I call them on a good day). Here are just a few extracts from the programme that should help local authorities overcome some of the problems we are currently having: 

• Setting government data free will bring significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites
• We will require public bodies to publish online the job titles of every member of staff and the salaries and expenses of senior officials paid more than the lowest salary permissible in PayBand 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale, and organograms that include all positions in those bodies
• We will publish government ICT contracts online
• We will require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000
• We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis
• We will require all councils to publish meeting minutes and local service and performance data
• We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties
• We will implement the Sustainable Communities Act, so that citizens know how taxpayers’ money is spent in their area
• We will oblige the police to publish detailed local crime data statistics every month

I’d like to end on a positive note as I feel I may have overplayed how difficult I am finding getting data out of WCC. On the whole, everyone has been marvellous at getting me their data and been very supportive. The ones that haven’t, you know who you are.