Towards a local authority-wide schools data-hack project

It’s a regular theme of this blog that transparency and open data – while undoubtedly being good things – can often create situations in which democracy is diminished rather than enhanced.

The other day, for example, I posted my misgivings about guerilla webcasting of council meetings. (Shorter version: can result in selective reporting, poorer press coverage and increased power for small heavy-preference pressure groups – boo!)

Looking at it from the point of view of a local authority (particularly the communications team as well as the councillors) transparency and open data seem to have created a situation where the amount of time spent dealing with the angriest local residents goes up.

That the armchair auditors – far from being constructive partners – are non-neutral political activists [this post makes this case in more detail] who are selectively disrupting the aspects of the local authority’s work that they don’t like.

And this can be a good thing – up to a point – but it fundamentally undermines the duty of a democracy to address the concerns of the whole electorate – and not just those with time on their hands.

You could say that Councils only have themselves to blame for this. If information has to be dragged out of them by FOI requests, then only people with time on their hands will do it. If information isn’t attractive to engage with, then only people who have the time to puzzle it through will do it. [Again, this argument is made in more detail here].

If information isn’t made available in a format that allows other websites and forums to consume it, then the only people who will look at it are the lean-forward activists who can trawl the Council’s website. Good, attractive, easy-to-read, well-presented information can – and will – be linked to from Facebook groups, Mumsnet, Netmums, hyperlocal sites and other relevant local forums.

So this brings me to the suggestion: How can we get a lot more of the key information that Local Authorities provide about themselves into an easy-to-understand, easy-to-engage-with, easy-to-share and easy-to-mashup format quickly and easily?

Here’s how. A local authority could engage with the Design/Technology teachers in their local authority area. They could show all of the useful ways that council data can be presented – from the high-end where data is extracted, cleaned-up and poured into a visualisation tool (this Redbridge local business mapping project is very much the poster-child for this kind of thing as far as I can see).

In addition, they could show good examples of how short YouTubed videos, presentations (slideshared or using Prezi, for example) can make more engaging presentations than raw CSV files or PDFs posted on the council website. It doesn’t even need to be that sophisticated.

Every page on a local authority webste could probably be re-written and presented in a more easy-to-engage with way by a user of the service than by a provider. I mean no disrespect to local government Comms people in saying that their audience can probably explain Council services better than the providers of it can – once that audience understands what the services are.

So how about this? Councils can hold a borough-wide competition – facilitated by local schools – for the pupil (or group of pupils) that takes some information that the local authority is willing/obliged to provide and creates a consumable, re-usable artefact that makes it easier and more attractive for the public to understand and enage with the information.

Talking to a few teachers I know, there are a number of ways that this can fit into the curriculum both in terms of design/technology and citizenship.

And if this is a good idea, then I think local authorities will need the following resources to draw upon:

• An outline of which parts of the curriculum this can enhance – essentially something that helps councils sell the idea to local teachers
• A good set of web-pages to look at that have how-to videos/worksheets/presentations/infographics
• A set of suggestions that councils can give to teachers (e.g. “why not get data about which businesses we deal with and put it on a map to encourage is to source more local suppliers?”)
• Guidance and contacts on how to run a local hack-day (it would be reasonable for a council to pay a few good data-visualisation people to facilitate something like this) to bring expertise into the process
• Advice on the practicalities (CRB checks, how do find a venue and organise a hack-day)
• Suggestions on how the motivation/judging can be done and how they can generally nudge-up the quality of the work provided by the schools and their pupils

I’d be interested in seeing if a few people would be interested in pulling together a set of re-usable resources like this that can help councils do borough-wide schools open-data projects. It will be good for the quality of education and – I beleive – result in a broader and more conversational engagement with local citizens.

Is this a suitable idea for an event like Local Gov Camp on Saturday perhaps?