It was great to hear last week of the progress Chris and his team at OpenlyLocal have made on resurrecting Planning Alerts.
Thanks to their efforts we now have a site where we can view planning alerts for each council across the country. Not all councils are there yet, but it’s a great start.
As expected, the applications are available as XML, JSON and GeoRSS, which made it easy for me to – in two hours – produce a WordPress plugin that allows any self-hosted WordPress site to display a widget of recent planning applications.
At the moment, there’s just the widget. I plan to add the ability to add lists of planning applications into posts and pages, as well as maps pinpointing each application.
This is partly the reason why I love Lichfield so much. Our council CEO recently joined Twitter and was last night tweeting (much revered) webmaster, Stuart Harrion;
At yesterday’s LocalGovCamp I led a session which attempted to come up with a good round-up of the arguments for and against filming of council meetings.
We did a good job and there’s still room for more additions. I’ve used the excellent wrangl.com to show what we came up with and allow the debate to continue.
While my request to film council meetings in Lichfield was met with no resistance it seems some councillors seem to be living in an entirely different reality.
As part of the Making a difference with data project I was asked to run an ‘unworkshop’ for the West Midlands which pulled together hyperlocal site owners, local government folk and data geeks.
Thanks to Nick Booth‘s generosity we had a suitable venue where we could gather. We had 16 people altogether and a good mix of backgrounds. It was also encouraging to see so many journalism students running hyperlocal sites in attendance.
Objectives for the evening were fairly simple: to find out the most important issues to communities, what information pertains to those issues, who holds that information and if it’s available, then how do we use it and if not what exactly do we want.
We started by brainstorming the most important issues to the community and ended up with the four big ones being;
Jobs & benefits
Anti-social behaviour
Budget cuts
Built environment
We split into four teams with each team looking at one of these issues and went away to discuss them and our objectives for the night.
The group looking at this decided on a few key starting points;
Information about available jobs is live and rarely out of date.
There is a difference in quality of information between jobs put out by the private sector (e.g. recruitment agencies) and the public sector (i.e. Job Centre) where agencies typically mask employer details. It’s unlikely that change will be affected here.
Public and private sectors have different agendas – i.e. Government need to encourage employment.
Job centres are policing rather than constructively seeking jobs for people whilst confusing people with a three-layered IT-based system.
With this, these points about necessary change came out of the discussion;
DirectGov database needs to be more open, instead of hidden behind the current 3-layered, difficult to use interface.
Provided as open data, the database could be formatted into more usable applications.
The incentive for this change is the need to increase employment levels and do that better than the private sector.
Obviously a big issue at the moment this group had a wide-ranging discussion. Some key points to come from it were;
Data could be collected in different ways which has an effect on the consequences of that data.
Data is not ideologically or politically neutral
Complications arise with linked data – i.e. as soon as you have one set of data it’s likely you’ll want to explore that data but will need another set of data to do so. This process repeats itself making a single issue more complex just because of the effort involved in analysing the relevant data.
Data rarely comes with explanation of what it is, why it’s been collected and using which methods.
Information is data with added opinion.
People approach budget cuts with their own opinion and seek the data to confirm that.
Food for thought from this group then;
How can we make linking data easier, and communicate that without overcomplicating it?
The 5-step process encouraging ‘just get it out there’ is great but the data now needs explaining.
It costs money to find out about empty properties – why is this, what is the cost for?
Where’s the cause and effect with empty buildings?
Is a property empty because of planning permission?
Some thoughts on possible solutions/advances;
Planning notices are placed on lamposts – these should be available as open data (i.e. we shouldn’t need scrapers like Planning Alerts).
Mapping planning applications could play a big role in providing information on properties.
Re-purposing should be a consideration. Birmingham City Council is doing this.
Housing exchanges should be looked at where two council tenants wish to move to another local authority area.
Conclusion
All in all a good bunch of thoughts and for me we can boil a lot of this down to five points that need acting on;
We need more open data – we have been given a lot but there is more out there and open data should be the default.
But we need context – data can often carry an agenda with it so we need context such as why the data was collected, who by/for otherwise how can we trust the data?
Linking data should be easier – the concept of linked data is all very well but there are very few people with the know-how to actually do it.
Data empowers community solutions – issues such as empty buildings and the lack of a home for community groups can be solved if the relevant information was freely available in an open format that could be interrogated.
Training is a must – we have a lot of data, we need more and we need explanations with it to provide community solutions to community problems but we need the knowledge to retrieve, link and interrogate data effectively.
A big thank you to everyone who came and gave up their evening. Especially to Nick for providing his office as a venue, to Nicky for shooting the videos andMichael Grimes for his notes.
Held, dismissing the appeal, that since it was of the highest public importance that a democratically elected governmental body should be open to uninhibited public criticism, and since the threat of civil actions for defamation would place an undesirable fetter on the freedom to express such criticism, it would be contrary to the public interest for institutions of central or local government to have any right at common law to maintain an action for damages for defamation; and that, accordingly, the plaintiff was not entitled to bring an action for libel against the defendants, and its statement of claim would be struck out
So there is your case law against Councils bringing defamation actions. This one is against a newspaper, it’d be interesting to see whether a council ever tries to bring action against a blogger or hyperlocal.
There’s plenty of discussion going on in Government about putting data out and what to put out and how to put it out and all that nonsense. Especially in local government.
It sounds like there’s concern that releasing data isn’t good enough and that government has a responsibility to put that data into a format that can be consumed by citizens.
This is true, they should be putting information out in a way that is usable and accessible. At the same time though, it’d be good if they just put all the raw data out and let anyone develop their own usable, accessible versions. It’d give government a head start in developing their own versions as they can see all the innovative uses of the raw data and take a cue from them.
Birmingham City Council’s web site is a great example of where it could help. A new council web site finally arrived late and over budget and was subject to a lot of criticism. Subsequently, a bunch of passionate (some would say crazy) brum folks made their own version by pulling the data from wherever they could.
How about if BCC had put their data out there and invited the brum community to do their worst? I have no doubt BCC would have a whole host of examples of good uses of that data. Examples that they could then adapt and build into the new site. Let’s call it data democracy, shall we?
Probably the best example of data democracy in action to date still has to be mySociety‘s TheyWorkForYou.com. Just imagine what those guys could do if they had all that data in a better format and even more to boot…. they’ve got plenty of ideas.
So, how about it Andrew; let’s have data democracy now and help us to help you engage with us.
