NYC launches municipal data mash-up contest

Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, has announced NYC Big Apps, an annual contest to produce applications using data from the City to increase access and transparency. The City intends to release a number of data sets covering various services, and award a cash prize to the best application written to use them.

There's no mention in the press release of what format the data will be made available in, nor which licence it will be under. While much of the work done by Federal government in the US is released into the public domain, I don't know whether the same applies to local government like NYC.

The contest itself is a good idea, but government data shouldn't just be released in one-off chunks. A truly modern government, whether local or national, should aims to have data feeds available of anything that might be of use to its citizens.

Given a decent API and a licence that allows free redistribution, people will come up with applications that make government more effective, possibly lower costs and almost certainly restore people's faith in being able to get things changed.