Just before Christmas we had an email pop into our Digital Birmingham inbox. It was from somebody who is setting up their own business in Birmingham. They asked us
“I was wondering if Birmingham City Council has a comprehensive list of the city centre postcodes so I could easily upload this to the admin area of my website, so when the customer places an order this will be accepted/rejected depending on the postcode.”
This is the second of two posts about issues raised within the current Cabinet Office consultation, Making Open Data Real. The consultation itself includes a total of 26 questions. So these two posts aren’t intended to be a fully comprehensive coverage, they are just two issues that I think are important.
Last week I wrote about the arguments which can be made for and against the charging for access to public data. This week I’m going to look at the question of which organisations should be covered by open data legislation.
I’m going to look at this from the point of view of a local authority and will, naturally, use examples from Birmingham.
Governments collect and maintain large datasets. Instances of such Public Sector Information range from geographic data to census records to real time traffic flows. In recent years there has also been a move to provide open and unrestricted access to Public Sector Information by publishing it online as Open Data.
The Government has recently announced its Making Open Data Real consultation on Open Data. All of our main political parties have policies which are broadly in favour of releasing Public Sector Information as Open Data and so it might appear that there isn’t anything contentious in this.
Hee hee.
Be part of two global hackathons, The International Open Data Hackathon and Random Hacks of Kindness.
A combined Birmingham Open Data Hack Day and RHOK will be held on December 4th, hosted at Faraday Wharf, Birmingham Science Park Aston, Birmingham.
What’s a Global Hackathon?
It’s a free event that brings together developers from all over the world to design and build applications for real-world problems, also know as ‘code sprint’.
You work the way you want to in a hackthon: you can join a global team collaborating across time zones or stay local, working with people in Birmingham. You can work on a pre-defined problem, or bring your own idea on the day.
What’s Random Hacks of Kindness?
It’s a “hack for humanity”, building applications relating to natural disaster risk and response.
RHOK happens all weekend: it’s the third RHOK event, and Birmingham will be the first RHOK venue ever in the UK.
What’s the International Open Data Hackathon?
It’s about using open public data, to show support for and encourage the adoption of open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.
Who else is involved?
Birmingham will collaborate with camps in cities across the world, including Aarhus, Nairobi, Sao Paulo, Chicago, Bangalore, New York, Lusaka, Berlin, Toronto, Bogota, Atlanta, Jakarta, Seattle and Vienna amongst others.
For more information and to book, please click here.
It’s taken me a while to write about Timetric after I saw Andrew Walkingshaw present their software with Emma Mulqueeny at Local Gov Camp last month. Essentially, Timetric is a set of web services which allows you to do a number of nifty things with datasets.
Yeah, really.
As their name suggests their raison d’etre is “graphing, tracking and comparing the movements of data over time”. Which is a subject both interesting and, like a lot of statistics, much abused. One of the things that I really like about Timetric is that they reference the source data they construct their graphs from. More – Timetric: Letting you tell a story
It’s probably time you had an update on where Digital Birmingham has got to with the Timely Information for Citizens project we announced back in April. As it happens I gave a presentation on the subject to a room full of representatives from other city councils yesterday. There’s a post over at the Improvement and Development Agency website which I was impressed to see had gone up within a couple of hours of me finishing my talk. The video below gives you some idea where we’re at with the project:
More – Timely Information for Citizens – half time score
Tom Watson’s Power of Information team have recently announced another competition to run alongside Show Us a Better Way . This time there is £20,000 available from the Ministry of Justice for the best prototype design that uses non-personal data and opens it up to the public. So now the bobble-hats have a real incentive to see what they can make out of it.
Show us a Better Way has had some success in encouraging public bodies to open up their data. A couple of weeks ago the Royal Mail announced that it was making the entire Postcode Address File available.
Digital Birmingham is a Birmingham City Council initiative and part of a city wide strategic partnership of more than 40 public, private and voluntary organisations
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