Along with 429 other competitors across Europe, we entered our application – this website www.ukcrimestats.com – to the Open Data Challenge.
I’ve no idea who the other competitors are or what they’ve done and I look forward to finding out – that’s bound to give me some new ideas. It’s great the challenge has had such a good response. Of course a great many competitors are going to be disappointed but it will still be a net gain.
Incentives, even remote ones, alway motivate people to do more and in the process they will acquire new skills and networks that they can take with them into the future.
It’s a bit of a cliché I know, but there really is no such thing as failure, only feedback.
Competitions that encourage people to innovate, especially with data, has to be the way ahead for public policy.
Let there be many more Open Data Challenges.