As I write, I am at the first meeting of the Local Public Data Panel. As preparation I asked people interested in the topic on Twitter and Facebook for some raw material to feed in. Thanks to all who commented – this has been very helpful. I shall update further on the panel in due course.
19 January 2010
@willperrin ‘talking to government data types today – what data sets would you most like from your council’
Feedback emerged quickly as follows, anonymised
1. property development issues – number and type of contracts going out, number and type of bidders, number and type of successful bidders
2. councillor expenses and campaign contributions…?!
3. Concentrate on what is useful for the citizen. Housing stock would be nice. But all non private data by default.
4. Internal search within council websites & SEO of ‘data pages’ must be better so we can find data without resorting to contact.
5. Break down of council agendas for public perusal in easy-to-digest format – encourages interest in meeting items.
6. it is also important how the council data is exposed. Many different APIs and registration would still obfuscate the data.
7. first data set I’d like would be list of all the data sets they’ve got do we could stop guessing who holds what. +1 for contacts
8. which departments are spending less than this time last year & deserve a bonus
9. sounds like standard info as a minimum. Date/time call, who made/taken call, type of issue, resolution, hand off etc
10. the dull ones. The GIS data for where the bins are, where the grit lorries go, street cleaning routes.
11. planning applications
12. Small area data: make it easy to select areas before downloading dataset. Don’t want to strip it down ourselves. #hyperlocal
13. How much salary do they pay, to whom, & *for what* ?
14. What assets do they own (especially land)? Useful for everyone from #allotment campaigners to inclusion & employment schemes
15. Bin collection routes & timetables! Bus timetables & routes. Planning applications (in a good format for once!)
16. ward budget expenditure is one small communities could really get their teeth into
17. API access to the excellent information at Transport Direct – which no one seems to know exists – www.transportdirect.info
18. We are running a campaign to get #hyperlocal datasets released in Manchester. We should talk
19. road works (GPS/times), school dates and times, all reported indicators / tracked measures, election-related items.
20. all data please and not in PDF format In fact, RDF please!!!
21. Public Data Panel could publish a guide to public data sets
22. Personally think that we need a definition of a common method of access to data across different LAs, public bodies (eg API)
23. release the lot and get the group to concentrate on definition of standards to make the datasets work across LAs easily
24. Do you create a service directory, define a common URI format for council data, some other method I don’t know of?
25. web services have never really solved the problem of making the data “machine findable” afaik – Do you create a service directory, define a common URI format for council data, some other method I don’t know of?
26. Cllr attendance records, expenses, committee membership, changing party affiliation etc
27. What crimes have happened locally (not the crime maps they are rubbish)
[ends]
William Perrin
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Excellent list .. agree re local crime data would be great to have start to finish data. Have just been introduced to transport direct too would be fantastic to have that as api
Great to have such good suggestions and to see such enthusiasm.
– I am a civil servant in CLG
Wow, an impressive list – will pass this on people working on our local datastore mashup project.
These are the datasets that we’ve managed to get hold of so far http://picandmix.org.uk/categories/
Only just seen this. If hasn’t been said already, need carbon emissions data. London data store to include this, and appears to be available via data.gov.uk
data is just first stage, needs then to be transformed into more user-friendly content eg to help citizens understand how well their area is doing in terms of their fare share of carbon reduction