This article was taken from the January 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

For years, proponents of "government 2.0" have been calling for the liberation of public data. Gigabytes of information about crime, health, money and the weather are gathering dust somewhere, so why not release them so we can build civic and life-improving apps?

A bunch of US entrepreneurs have started to make inroads: San Diego-based brothers Mike and Ryan Alfred launched BrightScope in 2008 after realising that, whereas Americans have more than $4 trillion (£2.5 trillion) invested in pension plans, there is no independent agency that compares their employers' plans with those at other firms. By law, US pension plans have to report their annual results to the Labor Department, so the Alfreds coaxed it to release that data, and then got crunching.


Soon they had created analyses so valuable that financial managers pay tens of thousands of dollars for a peek. BrightScope did more than $2 million in business in 2010 and now employs 30 people. "Without that public data, there's no company," Mike Alfred says.

Others are pulling similar tricks. In 2009, a trio of Wall Streeters created the MyCityWay app by cleaning up and bundling data feeds from 20 US cities, including restaurant-inspection reports, swimming-pool hours, train schedules, even traffic-cam videofeeds. It's been downloaded more than a million times.

So how do we get the attention of the UK government? One word: money. Shoving more public data into the commons could kick-start billions in economic activity. Because data becomes incredibly valuable in the hands of the right entrepreneurs.

Explore more: Big Ideas For 2012