23 January 2009, 17:18

RewiredState.org announce National Hack The Government Day

March 7th will be RewiredState.org's National Hack The Government Day, where "developers, designers and data people" are getting together at the offices of The Guardian newspaper which shares a building with the new concert and event venue, Kings Place. The idea behind the day is to find more ways to extract information, legally, from the vast range of government information sources, and to work out new ways of combining them to create useful new resources as data mash-ups. RewiredState.org are already gathering known APIs on a wiki.

On the day, which runs "from 10am 'til pub", it's hoped that people with good ideas for combining data will be able to work with developers, who will know how to get that data and designers, who can come up with new ways of presenting that data. RewiredState.org say the motivation is simple, "Government isn't very good at computers. They spend millions to produce mediocre websites, hide away really useful public information and generally get it wrong. Which is a shame."

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