Mashup Australia – Start Sending in Your Entries

Today, the Mashup Australia contest starts officially accepting entries – here is the form – so start sending ‘em in.

Remember, you can enter as an individual and/or as a team. Given this Taskforce was created in the context of reform of freedom of information laws, we hope to see entries from media organisations and journalists as well as technologists, hackers and activists.

A week is a long time in mashup land, it seems, and there are a bunch of announcements, feedback and other developments that have happened since we announced the launch of the contest last week.

Most importantly, we have decided to extend the contest deadline by one week. We have been delighted to see the flurry of self-organising activity around hackfests and mashup camps (more on this below) and want to ensure that everyone has enough time to host them. We felt that extending the original deadline from November 6th to November 13th would give everyone enough time to plan and organise.

The other key aspect of the contest…… which we need to draw your attention to, is the addition of Richard Allan to our judging panel. As the former Chair of the UK’s Power of Information Taskforce which hosted the Show Us a Better Way contest and the current Director of Policy at Facebook, Richard will round out our talented pool of judges with some excellent hands-on experience.

Via the “twitterverse”, we learnt that Google (thanks pamelafox) will be hosting a “Mashup Australia Hacking Session” in Sydney on October 14, 2009 (more details are available on Google’s site), which should give Sydney mashers and hackers a great focal point to develop contest entries. In hopeful anticipation of other events being organised, we have created a new events page. Feel free to let us know if and when you organise something so that we can add it to the list.

We are also thinking of challenges that we could hold during the contests lifetime — for example, for the agency or person that secures the releases the most data or specific mashup or data challenges…if you have ideas or suggestions about additional challenges, please let us know.

The feedback to date has been positive and productive. We waded into a debate about the best way to engage in open data licensing (thanks Cameron who kicked it off) and received some useful feedback about the nature of the information that had been made available (thanks S Wan, we’ve passed on your comment).

Internationally, the open access to public sector information trend continues to gather steam. The UK Government opened up its data catalog site to developers. In California, a DataSF Data Camp and App Contest was announced. And we became aware of the Vancouver Open Data Catalogue.

So now it’s over to you – send in your entries before November 13th and continue to help us learn about open access to public sector information. And if someone can assist cofiem that would be great…