Some background on Lichfield's involvement in Open Data, some tips on councils getting involved themselves, and the future of the open data movement. Delivered on the 25th March 2011 at the Scottish regional SOCITM meeting.

1. Open Data: Past, present and
Future
Stuart Harrison - Webmaster, Lichfield District Council

2. Our first foray into Open Data

3. 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

4. The next step...

5. lichfielddc.gov.uk/data
✤ Started identifying datasets we already publish on our website
✤ Built open data into new projects
✤ Started working with other teams to identify other datasets

6. Working with Openly Local

7. 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?”

9. A consumer, as well as a provider

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)

11. Along Came Eric

12. Spending data
✤ Local open data went into hyperdrive
✤ 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
✤ This wasn’t always well received...

13. Spending data Pt. 2
✤ Localism vs. need for standards
✤ Data isn’t usable across the board
✤ Currently all councils publish spending data - except one...

14. Our approach
✤ Publish the data in multiple formats
✤ Also make it human readable
✤ Also make it available as linked data

15. spending.lichfielddc.gov.uk

16. Why open data?
✤ Government is looking increasingly distant and out-of-touch
✤ Engaging citizens on their terms will help your image and also mean
better government
✤ Giving data to citizens means they can build their own tools
✤ Business models from data help drive the economy (and tax revenue!)

17. What to publish
✤ Look at http://openlylocal.com/councils/open
✤ See what data is published on other sites
✤ See what you can nick!

18. Data Formats
✤ CSV is simplest
✤ No technical knowledge to create
✤ Simple Save As... CSV in Excel
✤ XML or JSON
✤ Linked data
✤ If you can’t publish in any of these formats, just get it on the web
✤ ANYTHING BUT PDF!

19. How to Engage
Hack Days

20. How to engage
App competitions

21. The future (for Lichfield)
✤ Continuing to identify datasets
✤ Senior salaries
✤ Organisational charts
✤ Demographic data
✤ Live data from our CRM (reported problems etc)
✤ 2011 Election data

22. Public data corporation
✤ Could be the make or break moment for the movement
✤ Putting data collation, licensing and distribution under one roof
✤ Could it mean more monetisation of datasets
✤ Or it could lead to more opennesss

23. 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/socitm-opendata