To create economic, environmental, social and democratic benefit from open data and the use of data, it is not enough to simply make data available. Understanding that data analysis can be used to improve business performance, create new services that are based on information, and help people with choices and decisions is still fairly limited to ‘data specialists’ , e.g. data analysts and performance managers. We therefore aim to engage the wider community of potential data users and data owners and link to events, business support and existing networks.
Stakeholders identified
- WM Open Data Forum
- BCC / Digital Birmingham
- Birmingham Science City
Potential stakeholders
- Innovation Birmingham
- Aston University, Birmingham City University
- Other WM local authorities
- The third sector
What makes this approach smart?
Engaging a wide range of stakeholders early on and building the skills of the wider community
Short-term actions
- Launch the WM Open Data Forum as the organisation to pull together data users in Birmingham and the wider region
- Work with WMODF and investigate the opportunity to support a regional Open Data Institute node
- Deliver the Share-PSI 2.0 project, which is building a network of open data experts across Europe, organising events and developing open data standards
- Develop interventions to help people gain value from the market place, e.g., training how to use data, how to do analysis and coordinate interaction with Birmingham’s business support programmes, for instance, ‘train the trainer
Future actions
Establishing a growing community of data users that network and interact with open data portals across the region
Birmingham Smart City 