Vale Mail on the price of anti graffiti coatings.

Brilliant. The Power of Information Taskforce has created a £20,000 prize fund for people who want to develop new ways to use publicly owned data for public benefit. You submit ideas through the website boldly called showusabetterway, indicating a fresh attitude which is summed up by this quote:

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.

The newly released data includes information from the NHS and detailed maps from the Ordnance Survey. At the moment that is a little limited – but within government points need to proved, cases made and the Cabinet Office is clearly serious a about experimenting with open sourcing ideas and freeing data.

Thinking cap tip Bill Thompson and I’ll update with links to other blog post below as they emerge:

Justin Pickard: “This is what it’s all about”.

Shane McC: “Surely this can’t be government? But it is…Brilliant”

Guardian Tech: ” It would be fantastic if a Guardian Tech reader could win this”

The Semantic Puzzle: “They are looking for mashups”

Online Journalism Blog: “if we don’t make the most of this opportunity, we’ll have no excuse when the government decides to withdraw the offer”
Ideal Government: “we offered an OS map and a Google lava lamp”

Richard’s Kingdom: “what’s even better is that this competition is accompanied by a whole raft of new public APIs”

Ed Parsons: “I’m Impressed”

Skuds Sister: “I have more confidence in motivated geeks than in large companies”

Daveyp “does this mark a sea change”

Ideal Government: “Power of Information work is gathering pace and getting quite exciting”

Bob Piper: “My suggestion was going to be ‘Where’s my bloody post office gone’.”

Open: ” it behoves me to offer a little praise when they get things right”

100 ideas already Tom Watson: “we might have to find some more prizes.”

Personal Democracy: “Kudos to all!”

Web Monkey: “welcome news to mashup artists, whose work is sometimes restricted by the amount of data available.”

Peter Suber: “Do you think that better use of public information could improve health, education, justice or society at large? … ”

Tom Loosemore: Richard Stirling, John Sheridan, William Perrin and others – I salute you.

Recruitment for government jobs is a great opportunity to demonstrate how letting data free can improve the quality of government. Why do I start with such a blunt statement. This post pointed me to the growing discussion here on Tom Watson’s site about how recruitment in government might be given the Power of Information (pdf) Task Force treatment.

Some thoughts:

Treat all jobs for public bodies as your data set.

Don’t get distracted by a big recruitment website. A number of comments suggest a single jobs.gov.uk website. The opportunity here comes from allowing information about jobs to flow into all the little cracks of the web, to be placed under the eyeballs of those with the skills, knowledge, passion and ideas to be brilliant at the jobs. This does not mean we necessarily need a single website where all government vacancies are presented. However we would need a mechanism for standardising information about vacancies and attaching that to a myriad of rss feeds. To do that we might require something on the web where jobs are submitted… How about a government jobs equivalent of flickr – where descriptions etc can be reasonably standardised, those submitting the jobs can add them to groups they think are relevant, tag them as they see fit but critically important others can further group and tag the jobs. Obviously all tags, groups etc should have their own rss feeds to allow sites across the web to bring the jobs to the attention of their niches.

Social media requires social objects. Can the culture of writing job ads change so they become more of a social object, encouraging people to share them around the web? With that in mind services which widgetise government jobs and make them embed-able should be encouraged. (Did I just write widgetise a government job! Wince.)

Geotag. Place is also a niche. Almost everybody has a geographical constraint on where they will work so all jobs should be geotagged. (imagine how developers/economic regeneration experts/community advocates etc might use such data. Think of the opportunities for schools/colleges/adult ed to monitor required skills and meet them).

Crowd Source Job Descriptions/Person Specs. Most work cultures suffer from recruiting the type of worker they already understand to fill roles they already recognise. The government jobs version of flickr could also be used to seek suggestions of what skills would be needed to solve particular problems. Before recruiting pop up a description of what needs to be achieved (tagged etc) and ask people what type of person could nail that. Sort of a recruitment sandbox.

Don’t stifle competition for employees. Government departments, NHS trusts, local councils should be encouraged to present jobs on their own websites in their own context. It’s partly there that they begin selling themselves to potential employees and this competition should be encouraged, not hampered.

One final thought is that a single rss feed containing all government jobs would be political dynamite, a satirists Nirvana.

This extract on skating over ideas and invest in some deeper thinking comes from a speech to new graduates at The Pacific Northwest College of Art. Susan S Szenasy , editor of the Metropolis Magazine told the students:

As artists and communication designers you can choose to be the
outriders of society. Like the scouts in the old western films, you can
be in the position of surveying the horizon and alerting the rest of us
to the dangers and surprises ahead. But I worry about you. I worry that
while you have evolved the use of your thumbs to work at phenomenal
speeds, you are not as interested in developing the habits you need to
accumulate knowledge, knowledge that can inform your vision as artists.
I mean knowledge of the world—science, literature, and
history—knowledge of the great contributions others are making or have
made to our rich understanding of humanity and the earth which gives us
life.
It is not enough to find information instantly and use it
opportunistically to support your argument. To be able to analyze and
synthesize you need to delve deeply into a subject, build up your
understanding incrementally, and own that knowledge. Own it, so you can
call it up when you need it, without turning to your PDA, and use your
amazing brain-power to interpret what you know when critical analysis
is needed. What I’m asking of you is what I have always asked of
myself: To be endlessly curious about everything, to search for facts
when you need them, but more importantly, to search for ideas and
meaning. Read a book, look at a building or a landscape, drink it all
in—make it your own.

For more read here. Hat tip to Canufluck.