The thing about useful stuff is: Recycling in London

Recycling in London - a winner Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The UK Government has announced the winner of a competition designed to find better ways that the Government could make public data available. "Show us a better way" selected 5 ideas including one which has resulted in the website "Recycle for London", which highlights places in London you can recycle and opportunities to increase your recycling.

It provides useful details about local services including opening times and materials that can be recycled.

Sadly the site seems wedded to London Borough boundaries, highlighting services that may be on the far side of your borough rather than closer ones which may cross a border into the neighbouring borough. This may be at the insistence of the Councils themselves who only want to bear the cost of their own ratepayers, or it could be poor site design. Either way, it seems at odds with energy efficiency considerations.

Full details of the competition winners were reproduced from the official site were

Ideas where we hope to create a fully working tool

Ideas where we will develop the idea further

Prototypes we will be funding to be developed further

UK School Maps (showing where the UK’s schools are - building on data released for the competition by the Department for Children, Schools and Families);
School Guru, which helps determine whether your child could get into a school (in Hertfordshire only at present);
Where’s the Path, with an Ordnance Survey map and Google Maps satellite picture of any spot; and
UK Wreck Map, showing the location of undersea wrecks around Britain’s coast.

The fabulous thing is how the public's efforts can
- identify great ideas at little or no cost via crowdsourcing
- build useful solutions provided the data is made available from the closed data stores held by Govt at no cost