A while ago, I mentioned that I wanted to get some school pupils together with some data analysts to see if we could organise a ‘data day’. The good news is that (with the kind help of Deloittes and the London Borough of Barnet) we did it a few months ago (it was picked up [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Open Data’
Collecting data about the local voluntary sector
Thanks again for all of the feedback on those open data posts recently. Just to recap, I’m helping to organise an open data project for some school pupils within the a London borough in the new year. One of the big tasks is to flush out all of the data that may be available. I’m [...]
Why would school pupils want to mix data up?
Firstly, a big thank-you to everyone who commented on the previous posting here on local data sources. Aside from the comments, I’ve been given loads of really useful pointers via email and Twitter, some of which I’ll acknowledge here, and some will come in subsequent posts. But here’s an overarching question to start with: If [...]
Finding all of the interesting data within one local authority area
A while ago, I posted here giving reasons why I thought it would be a good idea to start involving school pupils in the processing of public data. There are strong democratic arguments for doing this – ones that aren’t immediately obvious. There are also good ‘transparency’ arguments (but I’d make my usual point here [...]
Data, visualisation and the talking cure for local government
Toby Blume – my co-host of the session on data visualisation at Local Gov Camp (last Saturday in Birmingham) – has posted his observations from the session here. In addition, Nick Booth has been busy with two posts on the subject. A few standout quotes: Firstly, here’s Nick: “…there’s a false expectation that visualising data [...]
Local Gov Camp session on what data visualisation is for
I spent Saturday at Local Government Camp in Birmingham – there’ll be at least one post along here shortly based on things I learned there. But this one is here to host the slides I used at the start of the conversation (sorry – Slideshare is being a complete pain today and I can’t embed [...]
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 [...]