Stuart Harrison is the web manager at Lichfield District Council, which has been a pioneer in open data for local authorities. The council first launched an open data project called Ratemyplace, which publishes food safety inspection results for restaurants. Harrison then spearheaded the council's open data portal to make more of its datasets publicly available. The council consumes open data from other sources as well in its "My Area" section. Harrison believes that open data can improve government transparency and reputation, reduce information requests, and enable new tools and economic activity from third parties.

1. Practical examples of use of open
data
Stuart Harrison - Webmaster, Lichfield District Council
Thursday, 20 September 12
Hi,
I’m Stuart Harrison and I’m web manager at Lichfield District Council, we were one of the first
local authorities to have our own open data section, and are heavy users of open data
ourselves. On a personal level, I also run www.uk-postcodes.com, a linked data API for UK
postcode data, and I am a contributor to www.planningalerts.com

2. Lichfield District
✤ Small district council
✤ Responsible for waste, planning, environmental health and housing
✤ Population of just over 100,000
✤ Two urban centres, Burntwood and Lichfield
✤ Mainly older population, but younger in urban centres
✤ Technically savvy, with a lively blogging scene
Thursday, 20 September 12
Lichfield is a small district council, with a county council that sits above it.
We are responsible for things like waste, planning, environmental health, housing, tourism
and more, while the county council take care of things like roads and schools.
We have a population of just over 100,000 people, with most of it concentrated in the urban
centres of Burntwood and Lichfield. The rest of the district is rural.
Our population is mainly older people, but younger in our urban centres. We also have a lively
blogging scene, with www.lichfieldlive.co.uk and www.burntwood.org being held up as prime
examples of hyperlocal blogs.

3. Our first Open Data project
Thursday, 20 September 12
Our first open data related project was www.ratemyplace.org.uk - a website which lists the
food safety inspection results of restaurants and food businesses in the Staffordshire area.

4. Ratemyplace
✤ Food safety website
✤ Built inhouse for Staffordshire Councils
✤ Why not include an API?
✤ Inspired by Theyworkforyou, Fixmystreet etc
✤ http://www.ratemyplace.org.uk/api
✤ Code also on Github at https://github.com/Lichfield-District-
Council/Ratemyplace
Thursday, 20 September 12
It was originally built after research by the Consumers Association in 2005 revealed that
almost everybody (97 per cent) felt that they were entitled to know how their local
restaurants score for hygiene.
The website was built entirely in house on behalf of 8 other district councils in Staffordshire.
As there was potentially a lot of data that could easily be put into a structured format, I was
inspired by websites like www.theyworkforyou.com and www.fixmystreet.com to offer an
open API, so anyone who wanted to reuse our data could do so quickly and easily.
The site has recently been rebuilt in Ruby on Rails and the code is available for anyone to
reuse on Github

5. The next step...
Thursday, 20 September 12

6. lichfielddc.gov.uk/data
✤ Started identifying datasets we already publish on our website
✤ Put them on a webpage on our site
✤ Built open data into new projects
✤ Started working with other teams to identify other datasets
Thursday, 20 September 12
After building Ratemyplace, I became obsessed by Open Data, seeing potential for opening
up data everywhere, so I built an open data page and began to add all the data I could find.
The page gradually grew so long, I changed this into an open data portal, built in Wordpress.
Every project I started work on, I automatically made sure I built open data into it.
I also started working with teams in the council to identify other datasets

7. Working with Openly Local
Thursday, 20 September 12
Shortly after launching our open data portal, I became aware of www.openlylocal.com, a
website that aimed to bring together information about local councils and put it together in
one place.

8. Openly Local
✤ Shows information about councillors, meetings alongside
demographic information, police data, hyperlocal websites and
spending data
✤ Started screen scraping information from council websites
✤ “Why don’t I give you the raw data?”
Thursday, 20 September 12
It shows information about local councillors, council meetings, as well as information about
population, the local police force, as well as local hyperlocal websites and spending data.
As not many councils at the time had open data or APIs, most of this work was carried out by
screen scraping the information from council websites.
I decided an easier way was to offer the raw data directly to Chris Taggart, who runs the site.

9. A consumer, as well as a provider
Thursday, 20 September 12
As well as releasing open data, we also consume it on the ‘My Area’ section of our website,
which allows people to find out information on their property by entering their post code.

10. Ordnance Survey
(Ward outlines and Parish council)
Police.uk
(Crime data and local police stations)
Openly Local
(County Councillors)
TheyWorkForYou
(Local M.P.)
Nhs.uk
Data.gov.uk (Local health services)
(Schools)
FixMyStreet
(Local Problems)
Thursday, 20 September 12
This is an old version of My Area, but it’s an easy way of showing examples of some of the
data we use. You can see the latest version at www.lichfielddc.gov.uk/myarea

11. Spending data
✤ English Councils were asked to publish all their spend over £500
✤ Formats weren’t mandated
✤ Although efforts were made by by the Local Government Association
✤ Data isn’t usable across the board
Thursday, 20 September 12
Recently, all councils in England were asked by the government to publish information about
everything they spend over £500.
Standards and formats weren’t mandated, so some councils published their data in Excel,
others in CSV, others in XML. Some councils even just put PDFs on their site. The sorts of
information released also varied wildly.
This mean that data isn’t easily usable across the board, as there has to be some sort of
human intervention to decide what means what.

12. spending.lichfielddc.gov.uk
Thursday, 20 September 12
We decided to take the approach of making the data human readable, as well as machine
readable, so as well as having our data in XML, JSON, CSV and RDF, we also published the
data on a website, following RESTful principles, so each piece of data has a web address, and
the data can be retrieved by simply adding a suffix to the web address (json, xml, csv or rdf)

13. Why open data?
✤ Reputation
✤ Cuts down on enquiries
✤ Streamlines internal processes and makes your data better
✤ Giving data to citizens means they can build their own tools
✤ Business models from data help drive the economy (and tax revenue!)
Thursday, 20 September 12
So, to conclude, why publish open data?
Government is looking increasingly distant and out of touch - engaging with citizens on their
terms and opening up information builds trust - shows that your organisation has nothing to
hide
If people can find the information they want online, it cuts down on enquiries and freedom of
information requests
If you publish data openly, you’re more likely to want to make it usable and sensible, which
means messy data will be cleaned up and more usable for internal users too
Giving data to the public can also mean that people can build their own tools, mash it up with
other datasets and give use cases you might not have thought of yourself.
If these tools have business models, then it could create jobs and help drive the economy
(and also contribute to tax revenue too!)

14. Stuart Harrison
stuart.harrison@lichfielddc.gov.uk
01543 308779
@pezholio
All the sites / webpages I talked about are available on Delicious:
http://www.delicious.com/pezholio/openingup
Thursday, 20 September 12