Focus on UK's open data experiences from Brazil

A delegation from the Brazilian government is in Britain at the moment finding about more about UK’s experiences with open data and the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act.

They are visiting a wide range of people in the UK and went to Manchester to see how the legislative structures we have in place are actually used on the ground and what can be learned about how to frame similar laws and initiatives back in Brazil

Along with open data Manchester campaigner Julian Tait and the Manchester Evening News’ head of content Paul Gallagher, I met with them yesterday and ran through the presentation slides below.

Notes on slide content
Slide 3 – explains the work Talk About Local started doing from 2009 using the example of founder William Perrin’s Kings Cross Environment blog and noting the limited data then available.
Slide 4 and 5 – highlights the local data manifesto we published in September.
Slide 6 – some of the current challenges facing local authorities and government departments.
Slide 7 – 17. Takes different scenarios and suggests free and easy off-the-shelf tools as solutions.

The delegation was interested to hear more about the augmented reality project we are working on to put useful content into that environment and we discussed the growing need for content to be tagged or formatted with geographical data (geo-tagged).

We also saw a presentation from Paul which showed how the MEN used data to analyse crime across Manchester and the decision to map every one of the 2011 riot convictions.

The group was interested in the ethical issues raised by having convictions kept online indefinitely as well as the way having such data in the public space might change citizen behavior.