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Hyperlocal in the UK

Real #opendata – opening up local authority contact centres to the public

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The theory behind open local data is to hold a local public body accountable and help them shape better public services.  To achieve this, the real prize is the database that underpins a local authority’s contact centre. It gives a unique insight into issues the public are contacting the council about and the rate at which they get resolved.

Many local authorities centralised their point of contact with citizens a few years ago.  This was part of modern public sector management ‐ answer the phone more efficiently, rationalise phone numbers, allocate and (crucially) track jobs and their completion around the council.  Chase up units that you can then see are underperforming.  I first experienced this as citizen consumer in Islington north London, about six years ago a council that was then recovering from under performance.   With other reforms the unified contact centre, Contact Islington made a big difference.  In the states the 311 movement was similar.

This is commonplace now , all very ‘noughties’, Barberist etc now as we move into variously the big society and/or the post bureaucratic age the moment has come for the next step: opening up the contact centre database in real time to citizens on the web.  We should see live data feeds of planning applications coming in and mapped.  Where street lights are broken, how long it takes to get them fixed.  Where people report broken things in public housing, how rapidly they get resolved.  Where the potholes are where the fly tipping happens, where graffiti is cleared up ‐ the list is endless.  That’s where accountability will really happen.

Ultimately all this data should be provided live in real time through an API to create a modern civic dashboard.  Turning the council inside out and democratising accountability.  The council doesn’t need to do the public facing application ‐ these days there are plenty of people who would do that almost for fun.  They could start by just releasing pseudonymised sample data sets in CSV files and encouraging people to play with them.

There are a number of cities where this is happening in the USA ‐ Washington DC is the leading proponent.  But precious little in the UK. I spoke to a local Councillor about this.  He said he would be delighted to see the infromation flowing through the contact centre ‐ remarkably members don’t get told basic performance trends and data by officers.

A modern contact centre operator should be able to provide data pretty easily with an up to date system. Indeed, one would hope that this data is regularly extracted for performance management by the council.  I put in an FOI request for some basic data at Islington to test the water and they sadly haven’t got back to me.

I spoke with officers at Birmingham who were fired up by the potential.  They have a modern contact centre provider there in Vertex.  I see that NESTA have a funding stream.  And Birmingham has a superb local web infrastructure for the civic good.  Would be great to see if Brum could be one of the first to do this in the UK. But is anyone else doing it?

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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. At Lichfield District Council, we’re working with MySociety to plug Fixmystreet into our CRM. As well as all reports sent via Fixmystreet going directly into our CRM system, as soon as they get marked as completed, they’ll get marked as completed on Fixmystreet too. Couple this with Fixmystreet’s API, then you’ve got something similar to what you’ve described!

  2. I’ve run a couple of focus groups in recent months with members of Dementia support groups. One big issue that came up with both was how hard it is to just get to speak to the right person over the phone at the local authority.

    I was speaking to them as part of a project called DemenShare, a social network for those living with Dementia. The groups wanted the site to carry direct contact phone numbers so that they and others new to the world of dementia didn’t have to suffer the same labyrinth of call centres.

    I’d like to see the self-service contact centre so that nobody accessing their local authority has to spend half and hour completing a simple task like finding out where their nearest day care centre is.

  3. Fylde Council is working on a system where community members can answer questions similar to the way that tech communities ask and answer questions among themselves in areas sponsored by tech companies.

    But I think that part of the issue is that 311 encompasses a lot more of local public services than most contact centres do. The lines between providers are often confusing and arbitrary. Even the Home Office sponsored 101 numbers (abandoned mostly) were very limited in scope. So best to encompass more than just the contact centre stuff, but that’s not a bad place to start.

  4. I wonder how many authorities are near being able to do this?

    I suspect a lot of councils are struggling to map the processes, improve the processes and get all services into CRMs.

    And, to make matters worse, technology gets in the way: too many applications bought because of e-Gov initiatives and without thought of integration. Too much resource then thrown at expensive integration.

    It’s going to take a gutsy decision to throw the resource required to overcome some of these obstacles in times of austerity. Long term there will be benefits and cost-savings. But, for your traditional, risk averse organisation it’s going to be a big punt.

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