A couple of weekends ago, with a different hat on, I helped out organising an event called RewiredState – National Hack the Government Day. The idea to get a bunch of programmers to reuse government data in new and useful ways. It was a great day: people seemed to enjoy themselves and some really cool projects came out of it.
Of specific interest to us at Consumer Focus Labs though was a project put together called Open Companies House, a remaking of the government’s rather dated Companies House website.
What’s the big deal though? Isn’t the data already available? Well yes. But what the RewiredState project does is provide a single url for each company along with a computer readable XML version. This will let other people build services on top of the data for free for the first time. An example from the day was linking it with information on which companies pay to lobby the government and are also government contractors. But it could equally be linked with carbon offset data, or food miles information, or government subsidy payments.
If you can think of an idea of how we could use the data here, go add it to our call for ideas.
