I attended rewired state my first hackday sponsered by The Guardian. It was a great event but it left me frustrated. I went into the event hoping to create some quite cool mash ups based around the met police crime website. My aim was to create a chloropleth map for the UK/for London showing various types of data with the expertise of a few others in the room including PSD (Osmosoft) and making use of my javascript map library I have been working on for GeoTiddlyWiki. I however struggled to find any geojsons of the UK or London and as a result fell at the first hurdle and wasted most of my time trying to get an svg into geojson form (albeit without the same level of accuracy). There is very little data out there - I visited ShapeWiki but unfortunately there were no shapes on there for the consistencies I needed as it is community based and I guess there is little motivation for developers to sit there and create geodata for counties when they can create mashups around data that already exists. Also I'm sure the data is out there somewhere but it's not public - and if it is it's hidden. The original source data for GeoTiddlyWiki I found by chance and that was through looking at the underlying code - there was no


So what's the solution to getting data out there? Would we benefit from a website where developers could post data they find and let other developers search it and use it? Maybe www.dumpyourdatahere.com? I'd certainly find such a website useful - it would give me time to concentrate on making things what I'm good at - and not wasting time reinventing the wheel. Would be really interested in anyone's thoughts if they'd care to comment... :)