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Hyperlocal in the UK

Government data on the ground, making a difference

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Tim Berners-Lee’s work for the UK government is yielding all sorts of interesting public sector data – the challenge it to put it to good use at a hyperlocal level.  I am rounding up some local data people to meet with government people leading work in this area.

Public sector data yields the most benefit at the local level.  Peopel get animated about issues on their street, but in my experience lose interest as the issue become more abstract and further removed from their daily lives.  To get government data working for social good in communities John Denham’s team in CLG need to stimulate a hyperlocal treatment for public sector data and help local authorities publish data better.  This can be done inexpensively and relatively quickly if they nurture emerging hyperlocal talent.

In late 2006 I helped kick off the power of information work for the then minister Hilary Armstrong MP.  It was great to start an original piece of work ahead of any other government in the world.  So it was more satisfying than normal just over two years later to be back at Number 10 to see my former boss Andrew Stott and his team meet with the Prime Minister, Sir Tim Berners Lee and Prof Nigel Shadbolt to announce another big step forward, bringing the Ordnance Survey and Post Code data out into the open.

This data release isn’t abstract though – it is intended to improve social and economic outcomes in Britain.  At a national level the UK’s superb data mashing and reuse community will create national services with local relevance like Fix My Street and UK schools map.  The marvellous map of public spanding by OKFN shows, even in alpha the shape of the next wave – the Show Us a Better Way competition my team ran in 2008 helped fund this.

There seems to be an unwieldy stack of data from national to local – data held nationally can often be localised through use of geotagging or postcoding – i expect that is where the OKFN work will go in the long term.  But data held locally about hyperlocal public services needs to be manually assembled from several hundred different systems. This is data and unstructured information about for instance police safer neighbourhood teams, local health information, social housing, papers presented to council area committees etc.

The people who can best make use of this data in neighbourhoods are local web publishers, people who run community websites and forums.  I run a reasonable local site that does its bit for local democratic engagement – but due to my lack of technical skills I need data to be served up to me in a very simple way so that i can just stick it in my side bar or subscribe to it.  In general if the data is packaged right for retail consumtpion, more or less anyone can use it.

My work with talk about local suggests that more local publishers have my level of technical ability than may be comfortable say with parsing things.  I wouldn’t know what to do with RDFa if it bit me.  Recently Richard Goodwin of the London Gazette reached out to me to offer some interesting data in RDFa, but i couldn’t work out how it worked.

We can see areas where people in the tech world are trying to make sense of the unweildy hyperlocal public services  data, though.  MySociety a couple of years ago organised a large range of email reporting addresses to create the world leading www.fixmystreet.com and the marvellous what do they know the FOI aggregation site.  Chris Taggart, who goes by the name @countculture runs Openly Local which makes and then compiles a huge range of feeds from councils.  It may be that Chris is the first person in the world to compile a service like this.  Philip John of Lichfield Blog has been working on a wordpress plug in to make it easier for local publishers to bring council information from Openly Local into their sidebar.  Chris Taggart has also published a Ning plug-in that Harringay Online is using.  Simon Gryce and belocal are, I think, also looking at this general area.

At the Downing Street meeting, I was pleased to see several mentions of John Denham the Cabinet Minister for local government.  The challenge for John Denham’s Department is to get local authority held data published and then stimulate creativity in truly local applications of national and local data sets.  There are some simple and cheap ways –  a competition with small prizes for good ideas, run a hack day with say the LGA or Dave Briggs.

First off though I have offered to Nigel Shadbolt to help round up some people who are interested in using local data for a meeting with the government team working on this.  If you want to come along, let me know in the comments,  with links to your work, if it’s over subscribed I shall use links to discriminate in thinning a list.

If you know of any other work on this stuff please add it in the comments and i shall update the post in due course.

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William Perrin

Founder of Talk About Local, Trustee of the Indigo Trust, Tinder Foundation, 360Giving, co-founder Connect8, former member of UK Government transparency panels, former Policy Advisor to UK Prime Minister, former Cabinet Office senior civil servant.Open data do-er, Kings Cross London blogger. Loves countryside. Two small children.
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Comments

  1. Obviously I’m gonna want to come along! I think Stuart Harrison (@pezholio) would contribute a lot too, as he’s doing great stuff at LDC and can give that local-gov angle. I’m betting Dave Briggs will have plenty of thoughts to share and I’m betting Andrew Brightwell (@andbwell) would be a good guy to have along.

  3. Phil’s right, I’d love to come along! I’ve done a fair bit of work with the Lichfield datastore and am busy beavering away with the data in data.gov.uk. I’m really passionate about getting as much useful data out in the open (both nationally and locally), so please keep me posted 🙂

  4. I have been happy to lead the groups to define how we should design URI Sets and Public Sector Ontologies. What I would like to see now is a Local Government data cloud where we can invest in the key reference data against which we can link, out data.

    Paul Davidson
    CIO Sedgemoor D.C.
    and Director, Local e-Government Standards Body (LeGSB)

  5. Hi Will,

    Local 2.0 would like to be involved if possible. I am sure some of the guys from the local authorities we are working with would jump at the chance to attend

    thanks,

    Manny.

  6. Living in Uttoxeter, geek rating about 60% :), a decade of working in LAMP technologies, particularly distance learning and education sector stuff. I am also a director of a Social Research company (http://www.weresearchit.co.uk) which may want to be involved in using this data.

    If allowed, I’d be coming to learn rather than teach!

  8. I’m heading up the Knowledge Hub project – currently funded by the CLG and being managed by the IDeA. Reading through your post I was able to tick just about every box in terms of what the Khub will deliver. The project includes a ‘data workstream’ and we’re currently researching what data can be made available by local authorities for use in the Khub’s mashup centre.

    I blogged about the Knowledge Hub a while back (http://steve-dale.net/2009/09/21/knowledge-hub-part-1/), and there are some more details (and slides) at http://www.socialbysocial.net/group/knowledgehub

    I’d be happy to contribute to any meeting with the government team you refer to.

    Steve

  9. The OpenLocally app is brilliant, I added it to my Formby Community web site, as soon as I read your posting. I am adding as many obviously web 2.0 tools as I can to both my blog(formbyfirst.typepad.com) and the community site above. I particularly like ‘apture’ which has added a dynamic feel to the blog, though I have to say I have absolutely no feedback or comment, other than from a fellow Parish Council member who said her IT tutor was ‘impressed’.
    It is quite a challenge to anyone who uses the variety of Blogging/Social web site tools. WordPress is a mystery to me but Typepad I can mange. My Ning based site is gradually getting better as I learn my way around the underlying CSS codes. They suggest running an additional site, which I do, as a ‘playground tool’, trying out the code changes in a ‘suck and see’ way. This helps enormously. I also think that running a ‘blog’ and a Social web site helps, in some ways they compliment each other and in other ways they point up or clarify the differences between the two types.
    If Local Councils are to progress they will need both and a clearly understood protocol on how to use the different sites in different ways. Finally I utterly agree with the move to develop these ‘open tools’ – ‘fixmystreet’ and notice of planning applications in my neighbourhood would/are crucial tools for local activists, neighbourhood groups and councillors and I am disappointed that disputes between the developers and Royal Mail have halted progress. I’d welcome the opportunity to help if needed.

  10. I would love to come if there is space 🙂
    As well as all of the above, I’m interested in learning about the actual skills potential data miners need to learn so that we can develop some resources for the TAL audience to start with.

  12. Some interesting points – and it’s great to see the Gov taking a keen interest.

    From my point of view it’s about how do we make it truely accessible to the end user.

    As well as for those that have data, how are they meant to provide it in a way open for all (i.e I’m struggling to workout how best to provide the Parking Ticket data, other than the current means of having a big list of files you can download!)

  13. I’d be interested. As well as my day job, and http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/, I’ll bid my work on microformats, not least deploying them throughout Wikipedia (can e-mail details, rather than giving a single link); and involvement in groups like WxWM, Multipack and Hackitude, which are bringing together coders, bloggers and ideas-people (not that I’m claiming credit for running them).

    Quite understand if you’re oversubscribed.

  14. Newly discovered your work. I’d be very interested to attend from the democratic application end. I’ve been working on eParticipation (including Expert Evaluator in Brussels and adviser to the Council of Europe on eDemocracy) and see local information and engagement as the key to progress.

  15. We’ve been working quite patiently through the Timely Information for Citizens programmes on rootling data out of local government. See http://www.bevocal.org.uk

    It’s not easy. The problem is often not obstructive people, but barriers put in the way through contractual obligations or decisions made at commissioning.

    I’d be interested.

  16. thanks everyone – great stuff. Expecting some movement in this area in enext few days – will convene meeting probably in January (i know, it’s whitehall time, not internet time)

    any others lurking in the wings pls let me know by posting

    cheers

    w

  18. I’d be interested to attend. I am the Government Solutions Director of a company called GeoWise that delivers its InstantAtlas platform to local, regional and central government clients across the UK. I have been working at all levels of government for the last 12 years.
    More specifically we, as a company, have in excess of 40 customers using our Local Information System (LIS) platform for delivery of this type of data to internal staff across their partnership and also to citizens. Local Information Systems, for me, have an absolutely key role in making some (but not all) of this data widely available – including to third party data aggregators. Many bodies already have these solutions are need to make sure they can support the diverse needs of a user community.
    One of my key interests is in the delivery of statistical data to non-expert users and I have been involved in presenting at a number of data visualisation best practise workshops across different Regions.
    Your ideas look like an exciting opportunity so would welcome the chance to be involved if there are still spaces!

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  2. […] Talk About Local » Government data on the ground, making a difference – The challenge for John Denham’s Department is to get local authority held data published and then stimulate creativity in truly local applications of national and local data sets. There are some simple and cheap ways – a competition with small prizes for good ideas, run a hack day with say the LGA or Dave Briggs. […]