DavePress » data

Hack Warwickshire

Dave — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:20:00 +0000

Warwickshire County Council’s approach to open government and IT strategy is impressive. Check out their IT strategy blog, where they detail their use of the cloud, for example, and their open data site. Great stuff, and good to see it happening at a council where I used to work! I spent a year as a Business Analyst there, between 2005 and 2006.

On the open data blog, Warwickshire have announced a competition, called Hack Warwickshire:

After the recent launch of our Warwickshire Open Data web site, we are really keen to see the new and innovative uses that our information can be put to. Whatever your idea, whether it is an incisive data visualisation, a web mashup, an app for your mobile or a way of integrating with social networking – this competition is a way for you to get involved with the open data revolution, build something cool and possibly get your hands on a brand new iPad with which to show your winning entry off.

Sounds good to me. Well worth following what these guys are up to.

Possibly related posts:

Open Data & The Rewards of Failure

Dave — Fri, 14 May 2010 18:38:27 +0000

Great set of slides explaining the issues around the publishing of public data online, by Chris Taggart.

Open Data & The Rewards of Failure

View more presentations from countculture.

Possibly related posts:

Enterprise mashups

Dave — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 08:47:02 +0000

Quite a few people – at least those that read this blog and others like it – are comfortable with the idea of mashups, the activity of taking data from one source, and combining it with one or more others to create something useful and interesting.

Often this happens on maps, but of course it doesn’t have to.

One potential application of this sort of technology which doesn’t get discussed much, certainly in the public services context, is enterprise mashups, in other words applying these techniques within the organisation, behind the firewall. So, taking a set of data or statistics from one department and mashing it up with another.

I’d read about enterprise mashups before, but the idea didn’t really catch on until I saw Bill Ive’s post about JackBe, a vendor providing a platform for organisations to do this stuff. Here’s a video giving an example of how JackBe can be used:

I certainly remember my days as a Business Analyst at a county council where I spent days taking information from one source and having to reformat it to make it play nicely with another, usually in Excel. Having a tool like this available would have made life much easier.

Here’s a whitepaper explaining all this in more detail (PDF warning).

(Obviously, there are other providers of enterprise mashup platforms and not just JackBe, it’s just that I wasn’t looking at their websites when I was writing this post.)

Possibly related posts:

Using the places database

Dave — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:30:33 +0000

I was asked recently by a colleague for some information about the names and locations of local authorities in this country. I was able to respond quickly and usefully thanks to the places database, which sits on the website of the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Here’s what I did, as a simple example of what you can do with this resource. We’re just going to produce a spreadsheet containing the names and contact information for local councils in England. I’m no expert on this stuff, but hopefully this demonstrates some of what is possible, and encourages folk to have a play.

First, go to http://www.places.communities.gov.uk/ in your web browser.

Scroll down and choose ‘download data by theme’:

On the next screen, we need to tell the system what information we want to extract through a number of steps. Here’s what steps 1-3 should look like for our example (click for a bigger version):

For step 1 select Current, step 2 select Key Facts, step 3 select Local Authority.

Two more questions to answer:

Step 4 choose Place Details, Step 5 leave start and end dates both as current.

Finally, there is a bit of a warning message – which I just ignore – and then the option to download the data as either an Excel spreadsheet or in CSV format:

Then just hit download, and your data will be saved to your computer. Dead easy.

Thanks to Martin Stone who first pointed this out to me.

I’d be interested to find out what uses other people have been putting this tool to.