19. “ How to” tools Linking your postcode user info to published data (Graham) Finding relevant nationally published data (Stefan)
20.
21. Thank you Tom Smith Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) e: tom.smith@ocsi.co.uk t: 01273 810 270 w: www.ocsi.co.uk
Editor's Notes
Going to talk a bit about some of the messages from the work we did with DataBridge, and in particular Amaze on their COMPASS data. For those of you don’t know me or OCSI, we are … Jo will be talking later about open data, and recommends from DataBridge. I’m focusing on what you can do with the data. Emphasis is on lessons for local VCS groups, focusing on simpler techniques and tools that smaller groups can do/ use in-house. Not gone to town on complex analysis with individual datasets (although of course happy to talk about that in the bar after if anyone desires ;-) For me, the success of this is if you, or other groups following up on this later (hello!), see something useful/ relevant that they can use to answer questions in their own organisation/ work.
Direct questions from service providers and commissioners.
There are of course wider uses for data. For reference, here are the 6 drivers of the open data & transparency programme, from presentation by the Cabinet Office team (Cass Chideock)
Not going to show much about the results – although that’s critical for Amaze, here I’m looking more at the messages for other groups.
Always worry a little about this, when using lots of text heavy powerpoint presentations. And not having a background in data visualisation … But bottom-line, presentation is important. To staff & volunteers (and potential volunteers), management and trustees, funders & commissioners etc. And data presentation no different from that.
Guardian chart of how govt £ is spent. People have this chart up on their wall. Who’d have thought it – government spending data as kitchen art. One of my favourite visuals. I prefer seeing the numbers in table if I’m analysing (with a background in theoretical physics I am indeed old school), but as a high impact graphic to draw me in and think about the issue, I think it’s great. Point is that data visualisation is moving on, people are much more sophisticated about what they want from data presentations. Challenge for all of us.
Don’t need to go the whole hog of Guardian graphic design – not many of us have those skills or time to spare Or even the home-baked version of pie charts and venn diagrams. (the “piagram”) But we do need to think about high impact ways of visualising our data.
One statistic coming out of the interview with Amaze was that the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) support service, operating with a single paid co-ordinator and 15-20 volunteers, supported more than 250 families per year apply for DLA. The £50K per year support from the city for this service helped bring in more than £3 million per year in direct benefit payments to these families (£2 million DLA plus an identified additional £1M in directly passported benefits).
We had a quick think about how to visualise this 60:1 return on investment. Too big a difference to show as a barchart. Perhaps an elephant and a mouse. But felt that an area chart worked – area of the squares are proportional to the costs and benefit. Text to make clear what’s what. This was made in standard Excel in about 5 mins. Interested in views.
We have also mapped the data. Using recently available geographic datasets released as open data by Ordnance Survey so anyone can do it. Although everyone has seen 100s of these, still a high impact of visualising your own data. And in this instance your data compared with national data to identify neighbourhoods that are under-represented on your data. Tools aren’t quite there to do this sort of thing out of the box for VCS groups without GIS or web-dev capacity– but not far off. Interested in whether this could be a follow-up piece of work.
Finish up with a couple of “how to” guides/ tools we’ve put together for the project (Link to demos)
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