We’re very excited to announce that we’re helping to organise an international series of events to convert not-very-useful, unstructured, non-machine-readable sources of public information into nice clean structured data.

This will make it much easier for people to reuse the data, whether this is mixing it with other data sources (e.g. different sources of information about the area you live in) or creating new useful services based on the data (like TheyWorkForYou or Where Does My Money Go?). The series of events will be called The Big Clean, and will take place next spring, probably in March.

The idea was originally floated by Antti Poikola on the OKF’s international open-government list back in September, and since then we’ve been working closely with Antti and Aidan McGuire at ScraperWiki to start planning the events.

Antti and Francis Irving (mySociety) will be running a session on this at the Open Government Data Camp on the 18-19th November in London. If you’d like to attend this session, please add your name to the following list:

• http://thebigclean.okfnpad.org/planning

If you can’t attend but you’re interested in helping to organise an event near you, please add your name/location to the following wiki page:

• http://wiki.okfn.org/TheBigClean

All planning discussions will take place on the open-government list!

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