Bounties for scrapers: a new approach to opening global data

"On Friday we at OpenCorporates announced an innovative (and frankly untested!) way for the open data community to work together in helping opening up one of the most important datasets there is: company numbers and names. Full details are on the OpenCorporates blog, but basically we’re working with the superb ScraperWiki to open up the company names and numbers in a consistent way. And because we’d like to use that info, we’re offering small bounties for each jurisdiction that’s added, with a total pot of £2,500 (it’s worth stressing that neither the scrapers nor the data will belong to OpenCorporates). We’ve already had a few scrapers written in response to the challenge, but are plenty more territories to do...."