Opening Up Your Ideas for Open Data

Posted by openkent on July 13, 2011

With the constraints we face, councils need to explore more agile and efficient ways of developing and making use of technology. At the same time, there is a massive opportunity to open up the development of ideas and solutions to people who have ideas and skills in how we can use technology to make the county a better place.

We also know public services need to adapt to the changing trends in how people use technology and what tools they use. Many technologies that were only recently being used by a few are now increasingly being adopted by the mainstream. That’s why we want to ask people with skills to develop or design technologies that use open data and our CMS systems to develop prototypes on the ideas that the public come up with in our competition.

What’s open data got to do with this competition?

We want to enable you to access and re-use open data, but we know that this is a very new area. Most people will never have heard of open data, let alone used it to create visualisations. Others however may have used tools to turn data into new web applications.

We know there are amazing opportunities for open data to be used. You can see what people have already created using the data from Open Kent here.

Open data competitions organised across the world have shown how effective they are at illustrating the opportunities it can offer to the public. You can see a selection of them here.

So we want to use the competition we’re organising to enable people who have got the skills to develop and design applications or visualisations to come up with the best ways on how to make the best use of this data to develop people’s ideas on how to help make Kent a better place to live, work or play.

How can you shape this competition?

But before we launch this competition, we’d love to get your thoughts on how you’d like to be involved in shaping it. Add or rate how you’d like to be involved here.

If you want to email us instead about the approach or want to find out more about the competition, you can do that too. The deadline is 29th July midnight, so get cracking!