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.
The Saturday before last Digital Birmingham were involved in putting on Local Gov Camp on its return to Birmingham. Actually, my Gov Camp started on the Friday night when 20 or so ne’er do wells turned up early to have a drink in The Anchor followed by a curry at Manzils in Digbeth. Already, it was invigorating to be part of conversations between such committed people.
Local Gov Camp is is run using the unconference format. Here we don’t have any key note speakers, the attendees run their own sessions if they want to and the agenda is decided on the morning, based on people pitching the sessions they want to run.
I had a big day out down in London on Saturday at UK Gov Camp, held at the Microsoft offices in Victoria. This event has been running for a couple of years now and is billed as being a self-organised unconference for “government types with an interest in how the public sector uses technology”.
This might need a bit of explaining if you don’t know what an unconference is. Essentially, it is where the agenda for the event is decided on the day and there are no keynote speakers, just workshop sessions.
Anybody can propose and lead a session.
We’ve been looking at the Nesta – Make It Local call for local authorities to release public data in a linked way.
Make It Local
“Make it Local aims to encourage collaboration between local authorities and digital media developers, to provide innovative, web-based services for their communities.”
Friends will know that this gets us very excited.
It certainly seems to have enthused a lot of other people too, judging by some of the conversations online and offline I’ve been having in the past week or so. And, having attended WMRO‘s excellent Open Data: Challenges and Opportunities event the other week I’m sure that the region is going to be entering some great bids. More – Nesta – Make It Local event this Friday
It’s been nearly a year since Dave Harte last gave an update on our Birmingham Open City project, and the officially supported part of the project is now over. The Department for Communities and Local Government are currently evaluating the success of the Timely Information for Citizens project, which is where the money came from. And, we also have a new government who are pushing hard on the open data agenda. All of these reasons make now seem like a good time to reflect on what we think we achieved with the work we did.
A sizeable chunk of the funding went towards IT equipment. So, we bought laptops, some Flip cameras, some microphones, a couple of digital cameras and a GPS device. These were intended to provide the capability for local voluntary and community groups to use for mobile reporting and to capture feedback from consultations. Most of this equipment is loaned to Moseley Exchange and has been used by a variety of groups, such as Save Moseley Road Baths, Resident University and the Friends of Highbury Park.
The Saturday before last, Digital Birmingham were happy to sponsor Andrew McKenzie’s Mapitude day at Aquila TV. This followed on from the successful Hackitude event held there in December last year. Both of these events are based on the idea that if data is released to the public then we will be excited enough by it to create stuff.
Andrew put together a really interesting programme of events over the day, under his strapline of it being a “workshop to develop understanding and practical collaboration between web developers and mappers.” There was one group of people getting excited and making things and another group who were exchanging presentations about mapping.
I wasn’t able to make the event, but speaking to Andrew afterwards he was really enthusiastic about what was achieved. The people getting excited included Chris Taggart of Openly Local and Stuart Harrison of Lichfield – Open Data who focused on the application building, along with Gavin Wray, Michael Grimes and Heidi Blanton who worked on locating the data and constructing the webpage that uses the application to display it.
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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