The winner of the open data challenge are announced. Jonathan Gray Open Knowledge Foundation, explains what the competition and who are the winners

Last week was the first digital agenda meeting, the discussion brought together officials, technicians and others concerned for the future to digital in Europe. The biggest, busiest, highest-profile event at the workshop was how the opening of the public data can increase the transparency, people's lives and create new opportunities for useful applications and services.

Most of the Data Guardian blog readers are familiar with data.gov.uk and Britain 's open data initiative. Meanwhile, there are dozens of open data initiatives at local, regional and national level across Europe scattered - from official data portals based meetups and code sprints, from Helsinki to Sofia, Turin to Warsaw. If you follow the # OpenData hashtag on Twitter, you 'll know that there is a new initiative almost every week!

Allowed the EU is currently considering the revision of public sector information (PSI) Directive, which mean that more countries would be obliged to open their documents and records to the public for reuse. While some countries currently in legal tussles with the EU over the observance of the directive, there is also a growing number of countries, the strong, high level of support for open data have. Severin Naudet, the French Prime Minister, advises and directs the upcoming French data.gouv.fr Data Portal, a short speech with a very strong, very explicit support for open data. The German government is interested in the potential of open data, and are expected to do in this area later in 2011. Many other countries have strategies, plans and prototypes in the pipeline.

But what good is all this data? A couple of months, we have the Open Data Challenge, Europe 's biggest open competition to date data. We asked developers, designers and citizens to come up with something useful or valuable use of public information. We hoped the competition would help to encourage more public facilities to open up more data to the reuse of data already out there to stimulate and contribute to the civic hacking community to strengthen in Europe - to ideas, know-how , war stories and swap code.

In total we have 430 submissions from 24 of the 27 EU Member States. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Data blog 's own Simon Rogers - The winners have been picked up by an all-star cast of open data gurus. They were announced at the meeting by Vice President of the European Commission, Neelie "Yes to Open Data" Kroes said.

As Sir Tim said, we had many more outstanding entries than we could give prizes to - from ZNasichDani, which shows who does business with the Slovakian state, to the Bike Share Map, which shows the state of bike sharing systems in over 30 cities around the world. Some of the entries built on and extended familiar concepts - e.g. making it easier to understand who says what in parliament, where our tax money goes, and where our nearest local services and facilities are. Some of the entries proposed relatively new concepts - like looking at how EU legislation evolves over time, or seeing what public datasets say about different family names. You can find out more about all of the entries on OpenDataChallenge.org and on PublicData.eu.

What's next? Things like the Open Data Challenge gives us an insight into what is possible with the information that public bodies produce in our name, but this is only the beginning of something much bigger. The real challenge will be to build a broader and more connected community of civic hackers, data, journalists, information designers, social entrepreneurs and others that Europe 's data, tools and services to us, the good thing that we don \ are 't use once they notice, to make it easier and easier to fathom ever more challenging questions about the increasingly complex and difficult world around us and to answer many other clever things we do haven' t even think.

Jonathan Gray is a community co-ordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation, founder of Where Does My Money Go? Project and was one of the main organizers behind OpenDataChallenge.org.

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