DIY data store for your town

DIY Data Store
WMRO #wmod10 event
15July 2010
William Perrin - william@talkaboutlocal.org
Talk About Local (West Midlands) Ltd
http://talkaboutlocal.org/faq
William Perrin TAL

1984 - Freedom of Information Campaign starts up

Gordon Brown
Tim Berners-Lee
2009

Maintain momentum

"Getting council business out in the open will revolutionise local government. Local people should be able to hold politicians and public bodies to account over how their hard earned cash is being spent and decisions made on their behalf. They can only do that effectively if they have the information they need at their fingertips.
Organisations that might have been effectively locked out before, including voluntary sector and small business, will be in a much stronger position to pitch for contracts and bring new ideas and solutions to the table."
@dominiccampbell "there are no rules, we want to see what you can do, your innovation" - @ericpickles #localgov

The ‘Crackavan’
Rufford Street c2002
In front of my house
Pics – Mark Bailey

Public Sector Information in action
Brand new street light broken for 163 days
Someone isn’t living up to contract
From snagging to failure
Can performance data help hold to account?

2007-2008 Took a lifetime to find basic relevant information on web
Street light repair – Islington average 26.5 days v 163 here
Lever for getting things done
Light gets fixed due to this and other factors

Abandoned cars and weekly arson
Bingfield Park, Rufford Street 2002
In front of my house
Pics – Mark Bailey

This 2010 open data would have been priceless in 2002 when fighting acute arson problem in Caledonian Ward

Towards a DIY datastore – first catch your data

Towards a DIY datastore – store your data

Towards a DIY datastore – publish links to your data

DIY data store: no cash, no programming , no brainer
First catch your data –www.whatdotheyknow.com
For tips on what data to ask for go to London Data Store and ask your council for what London publishes, in machine readable form such as CSV or excel spreadsheet
Put in two requests a day for data citing and linking to Eric Pickles and David Cameron’s statements. Use whatdotheyknow.com
Ask in the right way. Either – ask nicely if you think the LA will publish or you have a relationship. Or copy some of my aggressive FOI request language in whatdotheyknow, borrowed from Heather Brooke.
Get some mates to help you to spread load and prevent ‘nuisance’ issues
Send an email to the Leader of the Council explaining what you are doing – a common courtesy. Then if the Council plays up, FOI what s/he does with the email internally
Store the data – whatdotheyknow.com and google docs
Set up a free Google mail account and use google docs – put CSV data you receive in a Google sheet and click to publish/share the sheet (this gives it a URL accessible over the interweb etc). If they give you pdfs you can store them there too.
Publish the data
Go to Wordpress.com and set up a simple free blog, use the standard theme and don’t fanny about making it look pretty
Call blog e.g. opendatamidfordshire.wordpress.com – will quickly rise up Google
Give it a simple title – Midfordshire Data Store – helps with Google
Create categories in the blog for the types of data you are requesting
As you get each new piece of data store it in google docs, then write a short blog post explaining what data and what format it is in your wordpress blog, with link to google docs and whatdotheyknow.com
Tell people about it and get them to link to you

DIY data store for your town

by william perrin on Jul 15, 2010

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DIY data store for your town — Presentation Transcript

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