Just wanted to draw attention of UK Wikimedians and free culture types to data.gov.uk's Request a dataset page.

http://data.gov.uk/node/add/data-request

If there is some government data (public data, not the NHS records of your favourite celebrities, obviously) that you think should be released and can make a plausible case for how it could help improve free culture projects, you can request it at the above page.

I've just put in a request for GIS data from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), which could be imported into OpenStreetMap, and used to create historic maps for Wikipedia and Commons.

Government policy regarding open data seems to be currently that they want to release as much as possible, but they are putting a priority on releasing stuff that is of economic and social value. Economic value in this case might mean something like making smartphone apps available that visualize government data in useful ways (the economic value coming from people being prepared to pay for the apps, or their being more likely to buy things or use services based on the information displayed in those apps). But the social value is important too: we as individual Wikimedians can give government examples of positive use cases for this kind of data.

(It'd also be nice if governments could start seeing us crazy Creative Commons free culture people less as radical anarchistic nutjobs telling the government that they are wrong about everything and show that we actually want to preserve our shared historical and cultural materials and data...)