For the past couple of months I've been on secondment for 2 days a week to the Cabinet Office, working with the likes of Richard Allen on the Power of Information Task Force.
Earlier this week Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson launched Show Us A Better Way, a competition with a £20k prize fund to develop the best ideas suggested by the public for products which re-use public data. We also released a couple of new APIs and data dumps. ("After all, public data is your data.")
The response has been, well, really rather good.
I have but one niggle. While Tom and I have been getting lotsa props, the people who worked hardest and longest on all this were getting none of the credit, for the dumb reason that they're civil servants, and therefore, convention dictates used to dictate, must remain nameless.
Well, stuff that. The Cabinet Office just published new social media guidelines enabling all UK civil servants to be normal human beings outside, as well as inside, the government firewall.
So, Richard Stirling, John Sheridan, William Perrin and others - I salute you.