On Saturday 26 March, while loads of people marched on Whitehall, a bunch of geeks descended on Kings Place for the 3rd annual National Hack the Government Day. It was a mixture of old faces and new, some of whom got the hack day bug from the SXSW hack we ran a few weeks ago.
The day was spent translating publicly released data to build digital products that either helped government save time or money, aided transparency, or just made everything a little bit better – for government and citizens.
After eight hours of coding they showed what they had made to an audience made up of government, geeks, industry types, friends from the march, data-junkies and groupies.
Around 40 hacks were built on the day, including 13 making better use of crime and justice data and a selection of others using transparency, transport, parliament, and public service information. Details of these hacks and others can be found on the Rewired State projects page – they are being loaded very slowly as the developerss recover enough to actually load the info.
The grand-prize winning hack was created by Rob McKinnon, who developed a government data validation service: GovTrace. This showed 69% of public data released for re-use is "partial data" or "bad data", thus making it unsuitable for building from, and analysis.
For a full write up of hacks that were shown and winners, see the list on the Rewired State site.
