UK government drops its pants to encourage online innovation

Since the release of the report, The power of information (which I'm planning to blog about next week), the UK government has taken enormous steps towards using the internet in more empowering and collaborative ways to improve service offerings, communication and transparency.

I've blogged previously about the principles for online participation developed for UK civil servants, which was another direct outcome of this report.

Now the UK government has released a host of new government data, previously unavailable, for use in the development of mashups by individuals, companies and government agencies.

This is a virtually (excuse the pun) unheard of step for any government - to release data in a way that makes it easy for anyone to combine it, analyse it, represent it in combination with other data and form conclusions.

Taking the concept even further, the UK government is stimulating innovation by running a competition for the best mash-ups created using the data, with 20,000 pounds in the prize pool.

More news about the competition is available from Yahoo.

Full details are at the Power of Information Taskforce's blog.

The data being released is available at the UK's Show us a better way website.