‘What data would you like to see open?’ asks Bham City Council

As part of Birmingham City Council’s ongoing commitment to open data and to make it available via the Birmingham Open Data Factory https://data.birmingham.gov.uk/ – they have issued a call to gather the public’s thoughts and suggestions on types of data they would like the council to make available. This could be data the council currently holds but not yet published openly or data they would like to see ‘open’ in the future.

Note suggestions and join in the conversations here http://bit.ly/BrumDialogue

Data and open data skills for Birmingham community and voluntary groups at these Social media Surgeries.

First published on the Social Media Surgery blog.

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Could your community group or charity be more effective if you collected information in different ways, used it better, shared it with the right people?  Would it help if you could more easily find information that government has about the places  or perhaps the people you are trying to help?

We are experimenting in Birmingham with how we can use the social media surgeries to share not just social media skills with local community groups and charities, but also data skills.

If you want a chat – even to find out what we mean – please click the links below for anyone of the surgeries for the following areas and sign up…

Central Birmingham Social Media

Moseley and Kings Heath Social Media Surgery

Kings Norton Social Media Surgery

What should I expect?

As always we start with you and your group.  What are you trying to achieve? What skills and tools do you have at the moment?  Can we show you new ideas that could help you achieve more? Can we help you in practical ways use those skills and tools – there and then? Always the same relaxed approach of a social media surgery.

What’s your aim?

Our ultimate aim is to encourage more community groups and local charities to find good uses for Open data.  This is numerical information that government shares in public, so we can have a better understanding of the places we live in and the way government works.  But we won’t throw you into anything difficult, we’ll start where you are and help you with the numbers and skills that matter to you.

Is there any information online?

As we work with people we’ll learn together how to solve problems. We’ll describe what we’re doing and share it here on the blog.  We will also be writing about things that might help you, tools, sites where data is stored, examples from other organisations.

I have no idea what you mean when you say open data!

Sorry – it is jargony.  Open government data is when government shares information on the internet that it owns  and grants you and I permission to use it (using an open government license) A simple example is local government releasing a monthly list of all spending over £500.  You can find the Birmingham one here.  But don’t be phased by any of this – we want to help you develop the understanding and skills that might be useful for what you are trying to achieve.

Share PSI workshop in Lisbon – call for papers

Following its first workshop on Samos during the summer, the Share PSI network are preparing for their second meeting in Lisbon. This will be 3-4 December at the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering.

The second workshop is entitled “Encouraging open data usage by commercial developers” which is a subject of some interest to Data Unlocked, and so I’m really pleased to be going there to represent Birmingham.

If you are interested in attending there are several ways in which you can participate:

1. Lead a session. This entails facilitating a discussion. It may begin with a very short set up presentation but 90% of the time should be allocated for discussion. Proposals should not be academic papers but descriptions of the discussion you would like to lead and the experiences you have to offer. These are expected to be 1 or 2 pages in length and will fill slots in the Open Track.
2. Give a plenary talk. Longer papers, up to a maximum of 5 pages in length, are invited for consideration as the basis of a plenary presentation of which no more than 3 are expected to be presented at the workshop.
3. If you would like to attend but do not wish to lead a session or give a plenary presentation, please outline your interest in a short position paper. The intention is to make sure that participants have an active interest in the area, and that the workshop will benefit from their presence.

I really enjoyed the first workshop. The network has some strong partners involved and the standard of presentations was really high. We’ve changed the format around for the second workshop so there’s more opportunity for participation by delegates, with both pre-programmed and open sessions planned. We are also running the workshop in parallel with the LAPSI 2.0 and LIDER projects giving lots of networking opportunities.

The call for participation closes on Sunday, so if you want to come along you’ll need to be quick.

Digital Birmingham – part of the Share PSI network

Share-PSI 2.0 is “the European network for the exchange of experience and ideas around implementing open data policies in the public sector”. It consists of 44 partners from 25 countries, including Birmingham City Council. Through my work with the West Midlands Open Data Forum I was invited by Digital Birmingham to attend the kick off meeting in April and then the recent workshop which formed part of this year’s Samos Summit.

The Share PSI Network

The Samos workshop had the title “Uses of open data within government for innovation and efficiency” and consisted of a wide range of presentations, a mini-bar camp and a project meeting. Amanda Smith from the Open Data Institute has already written a post about the workshop and an extensive report of the proceedings has been written up by Phil Archer, the project’s technical co-ordinator from the W3C.

So, instead of a report back, here are just four of the things I took away from the Samos workshop:

• Data quality, or a lack of it, is still a significant issue for many public sector organisations. It can both be a reason for not publishing as well as something that can be improved through publication, especially where feedback mechanisms are provided. In Birmingham, when Open Street Map volunteers created a gritting map from the city’s data they were able to feedback anomalies to the city, which improved their data.
• We need to get a lot better at telling stories and helping others to tell them. Open Data evangelists aren’t always great at communicating their work. This can mean that the potential impact of our work is not always reached and/or recognised. At the workshop, Julia Hoxha reported that, in Albania, every “domestic media organization has published or quoted at least once the reports released in the Open Data Albania or Spending Data Albania platforms”.  This has been a result of the Open Data Albania project actively working with the media both inside and outside the country.
• Good case studies of the benefits of open data are needed to encourage ongoing publication. Bart van Leeuwen’s presentation on “Experiences with Open data in the fire department” [pdf] was a highlight of the conference for many. Bart was able to give a range of practical examples of the benefits of open data for him and his colleagues working as firefighters in Amsterdam. It’s heartening to hear such examples as somebody who promotes and uses open data and it provides great material to share with people who want to know the purpose of publishing open data.
• Everyone wants to know where crime is happening. Amanda Smith gave a very well received paper about the ongoing development of Police.uk. The site has 60m visits since January 2011 and continues to prove a popular resource (Data Unlocked download data from the site, and Mike Cummins recently used police.uk data in a presentation to the Civic Foundry‘s Skill Share week). Knowing what your popular open datasets are likely to be is really useful. I’d like to see more sharing of this between people working in local government. The work that Hampshire Hub are doing in this area could be really valuable, and it’s well worth following.

The next workshop is going to be in Lisbon in December. It’s topic area is Encouraging data usage by commercial developers, an area of obvious interest to us at Data Unlocked =0) The call for participation is already open. I’ve agreed to be on the organising committee and we’d really like to hear from people who are interested in presenting a paper at the workshop. I can certainly recommend taking part, as I gained a lot from the Samos workshop.