Timely Information for Citizens – round up
12th July 2010
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.
We held a number of local Social Media Surgeries, in Lozells and in Acocks Green. These were arranged through neighbourhood managers, had a sizeable attendance and supported a range of local third sector organisations.
Birmingham Open City initiated two data mapping projects. The first was a web service that allows people to add their ideas, thoughts, and emotions about a place. It was designed to form part of the pre-consultation activities as part of the development of the Moseley Big Plan.
The Moseley Community Development Trust chose not to take up the web service application. However, the same idea has since been used as part of a British Council project visiting Pilzen in the Czech Republic.
The second demonstrator project was intended to be a widget that pulled location-specific public service data from various sources. This project was close to fruition when West Midlands Police changed its Occupational Command Units boundaries making the data filtered through the widget inaccurate.
So, in a way, we had some less than successful outcomes from this part of the project. However, we had always said that anything produced by the project would be published as open source in order to be reused and reshaped elsewhere. And so we’re actually quite pleased to see that Stef, the developer, has taken it with him and adapted it elsewhere.
The project established the Be Vocal website which exists as a resource for pointing to publically available data sets, both within Birmingham, across the West Midlands and nationally. It was also used to arrange and publicise the events that were carried out as part of the project and it is being maintained as a resource still, beyond the initial time period of the project.
As part of the programme Nick Booth from Podnosh also spoke at a number of meetings, to share with leaders from the Third Sector and key council officers the types of online civic activism which were emerging in the city.
We were supportive of the Hackitude and Mapitude events that were held at Aquila TV and which gathered volunteers together to create projects and share discussions and workshops around open public data over different weekends this year,
What pleased us most about this was whereas Dave Harte was instrumental in setting up Hackitude, we were only approached by Andrew MacKenzie for some support for Mapitude after he had made all of the arrangements. This fits in with the project’s flexible support of ideas when it comes to funding, with citizens deciding where the innovation takes place and it then being supported by the local authority or public sector body.
Of course, open data is starting to take on a wider importance in local government right now. I will be speaking at the West Midlands Regional Observatory Open data event on Thursday this week about our Timely Information for Citizens work. But Digital Birmingham are also building on this experience, looking to the future and exploring how the city and its citizens make the most of the opportunities that open data bring us.
As part of the planning of that work we’d be interested in people’s opinions as to what they think our role should be. Oh, and don’t worry, we’ve plenty of ideas of our own as well.
And finally, can I ask that if you attended any of our events listed above that you fill in this evaluation questionnaire, please?
The site that Stef developed for the project is here: http://geopinion.heroku.com and the source code for it is at http://github.com/steflewandowski/Geopinion