An outfit called UnLtd has these Better Net Awards of between £5,000 and £15,000 for “original and innovative projects” that increases education about the Internet and IT, or provides an internet based solution to social, educational, health and environmental issues, and so on. 

Your project is not supposed to be part of your paid employment, involve political campaigning, encourage commercial disharmony, employ people other than yourself, or fund living expenses. 

Well, that pretty much blows any of the ideas I tend to come up with.  Maybe I have the wrong attitude.  Or perhaps my attitude is a result of the ideas I happen to come up with.  

If these awards are your cup of tea, do look to their case studies for inspiration, as well as their ideas bank.

Update: If you have already have something working, then you can consider entering it into the Nominet Awards.

The relevance to us is that a proportion of the winning ideas will certainly rely on structured local public data — of the kind that ScraperWiki is intended to produce.  Suppose your idea is a creative way to encourage volunteers to visit their local old people’s home (eg to set up and maintain a free internet terminal in their common room).  Well, for that you’re probably going to need a database of old people’s homes.  And this can be scraped from the Care Quality Commission. 

The ScraperWiki technology is supposed to make it cheaper and easier to implement new and better ideas for these kinds awards.  So go for it.  Their online form is here.