William Perrin TAL

DIY Data StoreWMRO #wmod10 event

15 July 2010

William Perrin - william@talkaboutlocal.org

Talk About Local (West Midlands) Ltdhttp://talkaboutlocal.org/faq

1984 - Freedom of Information Campaign starts up

Gordon BrownTim Berners-Lee2009

Maintain momentum

"Getting council business out in the open will revolutionise local government. Local people should be able to hold politicians and public bodies to account over how their hard earned cash is being spent and decisions made on their behalf. They can only do that effectively if they have the information they need at their fingertips.

Organisations that might have been effectively locked out before, including voluntary sector and small business, will be in a much stronger position to pitch for contracts and bring new ideas and solutions to the table."

@dominiccampbell "there are no rules, we want to see what you can do, your innovation" - @ericpickles #localgov

The ‘Crackavan’Rufford Street c2002In front of my house Pics – Mark Bailey

Public Sector Information in actionBrand new street light broken for 163 daysSomeone isn’t living up to contractFrom snagging to failureCan performance data help hold to account?

Highway authority BV 215b - average time taken to repair a street

lighting fault, where response time is under the

control of a DNO Enfield 7.74 Ealing 9.35 Tower Hamlets 12.31 Harrow 13.40 Barnet 16.98 Hounslow 17.27 Southwark 17.43 City 19.00 Hammersmith and Fulham 20.21 Wandsworth 20.76 Hillingdon 20.81 Richmond 21.09 Waltham Forest 21.93 Haringey 21.96 Kingston Upon Thames 22.00 Barking and Dagenham 23.34* Merton 23.53 Havering 24.95 Kensington and Chelsea 25.88 Islington 26.50 Croydon 27.06 Redbridge 27.28 Newham 27.46 Sutton 27.89 Brent 30.54 Hackney 32.16 Lambeth 32.84 Camden 32.94 Bromley 35.69 Lewisham 38.77* Westminster 39.84* Transport for London 42.40 Greenwich 70.99 Bexley 77.45

2007-2008 Took a lifetime to find basic relevant information on webStreet light repair – Islington average 26.5 days v 163 hereLever for getting things doneLight gets fixed due to this and other factors

Abandoned cars and weekly arsonBingfield Park, Rufford Street 2002In front of my house Pics – Mark Bailey

This 2010 open data would have been priceless in 2002 when fighting acute arson problem in Caledonian Ward

Towards a DIY datastore – first catch your data

Towards a DIY datastore – store your data

Towards a DIY datastore – publish links to your data

DIY data store: no cash, no programming , no brainer

• First catch your data –www.whatdotheyknow.com– For tips on what data to ask for go to London Data Store and ask your council for what London publishes, in

machine readable form such as CSV or excel spreadsheet– Put in two requests a day for data citing and linking to Eric Pickles and David Cameron’s statements. Use

whatdotheyknow.com– Ask in the right way. Either – ask nicely if you think the LA will publish or you have a relationship. Or copy some of

my aggressive FOI request language in whatdotheyknow, borrowed from Heather Brooke.– Get some mates to help you to spread load and prevent ‘nuisance’ issues– Send an email to the Leader of the Council explaining what you are doing – a common courtesy. Then if the

Council plays up, FOI what s/he does with the email internally

• Store the data – whatdotheyknow.com and google docs– Set up a free Google mail account and use google docs – put CSV data you receive in a Google sheet and click to

publish/share the sheet (this gives it a URL accessible over the interweb etc). If they give you pdfs you can store them there too.

• Publish the data– Go to Wordpress.com and set up a simple free blog, use the standard theme and don’t fanny about making it look

pretty– Call blog e.g. opendatamidfordshire.wordpress.com – will quickly rise up Google– Give it a simple title – Midfordshire Data Store – helps with Google– Create categories in the blog for the types of data you are requesting– As you get each new piece of data store it in google docs, then write a short blog post explaining what data and

what format it is in your wordpress blog, with link to google docs and whatdotheyknow.com– Tell people about it and get them to link to you