Who loves data? If we’re talking about the android from Star Trek: TNG, then I do, and if we’re talking about the thing that’s not the plural of anecdotes, then I’m pretty sure the answer is everyone.

If you love data, then you’ll definitely love visualising data, and Google have teamed up with the Open Knowledge Foundation to launch a data-visualising competition. Nobody has more data than… well, Google, but second in that race is Governments, and the world’s governments are releasing a massive shedload of open data for people to play with.

The competition is to find new approaches to visualising this pile of data, by designing an app or other data visualisation, using existing tools or your own new ones. The competition is open to citizens of the UK, US, France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, and Sweden, and there’s a prize of \$2,000 for the winner, and presumably they can choose whether or not to visualise what they spend it on. The Guardian Datastore, which is apparently a thing, will publish the winning entry on their Show and Tell site.

This isn’t the first competition of its type – a previous one was run late last year to visualise the flow of development aid money in the world. The winning entry for that was also published on The Guardian Datastore, as an interactive map.

Further reading:
The Guardian – Competition: visualise open government data and win $2,000