Vote for the idea you think should win Show Us A Better Way
The government’s Show Us A Better Way competition has finished its first part – getting entries. And there are lots of them. (More than 500, by a rough count.)
We’ve been asked to help draw up the shortlist, and take part in the judging panel. And we’ve been specifically asked to get everyone out there to vote on their preferred ones.
You can: go to http://suabw.uservoice.com and get stuck in. Almost all of the entries are there, apart from some last-minute entries. (There may also be duplications: when you find them, leave a comment and I’ll try to fix it.)
You each have 10 votes; use them wisely.
How should you choose? Ah, yes, that’s the question. I think that ideas that truly deserve the £20,000 prize should be (1) widely useful [which I think rules out applications that would only run on particular computers or phones] (2) achievable [ie not requiring supercomputers, or everyone installing some custom-made widget] (3) beneficial (4) not duplicating something that could be or is already done commercially (5) has that magic something which makes you think “ooh, clever!”.
Those, anyway, would be my suggestions. You’re welcome to use your own criteria. But get voting and tell your friends!
We’ve also written about it in the Guardian. Even so, tell more people..
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Show Us A Better Way competition closes Sept 30: get your entries in! (24 September 2008; score: 29.56%)
- Show Us A Better Way: the winners are chosen (6 November 2008; score: 26.69%)
- Show Us A Better Way offers £20,000 for developing prototypes (4 August 2008; score: 22.49%)
- How the Inspire directive was watered down (23 November 2006; score: 16.75%)
- Show Us A Better Way winner: Can I Recycle It? (10 November 2008; score: 16.73%)
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:50 am
Taking a scroll though three things struck me immediately.
Firstly there are many duplicates still on the list (find on graves shows up three entries for the war graves suggestion).
Secondly alot of data requests car parks, post offices etc are commercially available already eg Points of interest and address products from Ordnance Survey or NLPG.
And finally many of the services requested are already deployed within commercial offerings used by local authorities on an individual basis eg routing to schools is part of most schools admin back office systems, or commecially free weather reports for hill walkers is available via Metcheck.
The common theme for many of these though is that they are delivered via traditional GIS interfaces on a local basis not a national basis
October 8th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Will this voting determine the winner? If so, it seems a little unfair given that the entries are listed from most votes to the least, with some of the entries even not appearing on the page. In this situation those near the top will continue to accumulate more votes at the expense of those further down or not on the list.
October 12th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Oh come on, this is so open to abuse! If you keep clearing your cookies you can keep voting anonymously again and again. I can’t believe the uservoice.com site does nothing to prevent abuse. The current leader has 686 anonymous votes, only 4 registered votes and just 2 comments.
And if people haven’t worked that out then the competition is really a case of “I have more friends than you.” i.e. email all your friends or colleagues or start a viral campaign using Facebook to get them to voice.
FreeOurData may be about fair use of data, but the voting mechanism is anything but fair. Thank god uservoice.com isn’t used for deciding community or national issues. There are plenty of “how to” books that explain how to improve website security, user abuse, and user detection. I suppose anyone who does register will have their details burnt onto CD and posted into the ether. Or lost on a memory stick somewhere. Honestly!
October 12th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
@Danny @Gary – I said in the post that this is drawing up a *shortlist* – it is not necessarily choosing the winner. I think that if it really were about choosing the winner by an outright vote, then a much more rigorous system – set up by the government, rather than chosen from a selection of free offerings by ourselves – would have been put in place.
@Pete I hope that I’ve removed the duplicates some time ago.
October 14th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Charles, how can you use uservoice.com even if merely to draw up a shortlist if people have kept clearing their cookies and voting 100’s of times until they’ve ranked up far more votes than other entries where *different* people have *genuinely* voted? This makes your task of drawing up a shortlist based on public opinion impossible if the data is totally unreliable. The most voted for ideas could in fact be the least popular if 2 different people voted 100’s of times compared to an idea where 10 different people voted just once each.
Maybe you need to look at the *registered* votes from *unique* and *verified* email addresses instead of the anonymous votes? Or I suppose read all of the comments that have been left since you have to be registered to post a comment.