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We’ve had a good response to participation so far. The conversations that we’ve had have included some very specific requests, such as the location of all the police stations in the UK, which isn’t yet available.

The location of stations can be very important when crime mapping and especially when looking at the prevalence of crime . For a variety of reasons some crimes are geo-located at the local police station. If you can’t allow for this then your mapping can make it look as though there is a mini crime wave around police stations.

Will Perrin has written about a proposed Transparency Charter for open justice. He listed the following data that he is interested in seeing published openly:

• name, address and specific charges in all cases available from the time the case is scheduled (see footnote)
• the full names, including first names, of judges, prosecution and defence lawyers, witnesses, and other professionals who speak during proceedings (e.g. magistrates’ clerks giving legal advice) from when they are known
• judgements handed down from the end of the working day on which the case is concluded
• next stage of the case.

And some of us have had an interesting discussion about the principles of open justice versus the risks inherent in naming people accused of crimes online.

Returning to crime mapping, the Home Office have recently announced some proposed changes to the way that location data is provided through the Police UK API. This has generated a discussion about which administrative geographies are desirable to have returned by the API and csv downloads. There has also been some challenge to the extent that Police Uk should be involved in processing the data.

So, the question that I am interested in is: if you have an interest in the Crime and Justice sector, what are the datasets that you would like to see opened up?

Obviously, I can’t promise that everything that somebody suggests to us will be made available, but we will do our best to champion people’s requests. Please put your requests in the comments below.

This means that their living circumstances are such – they may have substance addiction(s), be living in temporary accommodation or newly arrived in the country, for example – that their pregnancy is in particular risk of having a poor outcome.

Pregnancy outreach workers (POWs) support pregnant women during their pregnancy, help them attend clinical appointments and aim for them to be more independent upon leaving the service. Often they will help them with access to another service and will hand them over to them when their POWs support finishes.

We’ve looked at a number of the different frameworks that organisations use when they are commissioning public health services that relate to pregnancy and maternity. From those we have created a system where a service provider, such as Gateway, can enter their summary data once, but can then publish it against any one of a number of the relevant frameworks.

The frameworks we have looked at include:

• NICE – Pregnancy and complex social factors
• Department of Health –  Improving Outcomes and Supporting Transparency
• NHS West Midlands - Investing for Health project
• Department of Health - Healthy Child Programme: Pregnancy and the first five years of life

As part of this work we have gone back and spoken with outreach workers about how they collect the data and what it means to them. So, for instance, we’ve found that most staff will mark somebody as homeless if they are living in a hostel, which doesn’t match the government’s definition of homeless (if you’re in a hostel then officially you’re living in temporary accommodation).

Because of this we’ve created a data dictionary that defines what each indicator is, why it is collected and which framework(s) it is used in. We’ll be publishing this with an open license as part of the project and the summary data will be available in open formats.

I’ll be talking about the work we’ve done, and how it sits alongside the other digital tools that Gateway have been developing with Podnosh, at the Measuring Outcomes – Producing Evidence – Demonstrating Impact event in Leeds next week.

We hope that it’ll be a really interesting event, for organisations who provide public health services as well as people who commission them.

As a recap, the challenges that we have set are:

How can open data projects be constructed that achieve one of the following:

• increase community involvement with the criminal justice system?
• create further evidence for what are effective interventions for rehabilitation?
• address the rise in personal crime?

An obvious question to ask is why would somebody want to take part in the series?

Well, we are anticipating working in partnership with Nesta on prizes where we expect to make awards of up to £5k for pre-seed investment with a single final prize of up to £25k and it could be that you have your eye on the prize money. We think that there are a lot of other benefits to be had from taking part though, and there are some great opportunities for having the development of your ideas supported by the series.

Over the next few months participants will be working towards the Creation and Innovation Weekend at the end of June. Here they will need to produce their open data project and a business plan that demonstrates how they will be able to make money from their idea. It’s during this development period that I’ll act as a go-between for requesting data, accessing expert advice and making connections to people in the ODI who can help participants achieve these goals.

Crime Scene – Image from Free Photo

So, applying to participate could get you access to some help from me, but also to resources and expertise to help you get your project off the ground.

Teams who are successful at the Creation and Innovation Weekend, and these are not necessarily just the ones winning prize money, will have the chance of entering the ODI’s Start Up Programme. This programme is part of the ODI’s mission to incubate new businesses and create economic growth through the use of open data.

Put simply, the ODI has a mission to make at least some of these businesses a success. If you are successful at the Creation and Innovation Weekend you could be one of them.

If this has piqued your interest then you can go and sign up immediately on the ODI Immersion Programme pages. I’ll be contacting all of the current applicants over the coming week to discuss their projects with them and how I can help them.

Also, there are a couple of Hackathon events going on at the end of the month that will be of interest, both to people already signed up and to those who want to find out some more.

The BlueLightCamp Hackathon #UKBLC13 is happening on Sunday 28th April in Manchester. This is being organised by friends Sasha Taylor and Mark Braggins and I’m very pleased to have been asked to host the event. This is an excellent opportunity to find out more about the Immersion Programme, test out some ideas and potentially form teams.

As well as hosting, I’ll be happy to advise people on the sort of open data projects they could develop and take forward on the Immersion Programme.

Hack The Police is a hackathon which is on the same weekend in London. It has the aims of “looking for new ways to improve the service the police provide, boost public confidence, help the public reach out to each other and the police, and help to tackle crime.”

Both of these events, although run separately, will be working alongside each other and using the same hashtag of #bluelighthack

Last Wednesday, 20th March, we kicked off with a day long session at the Open Data Institute where we discussed what three challenges should be set for participants in the programme. The day was arranged and co-hosted by Olivia Burnam from the ODI, who will continue supporting the programme when she returns to the Cabinet Office next month.

Open Data Institute logo

Olivia and I were keen that the discussion concentrated on real issues that people involved in the crime and justice sectors want tackling. One of the advantages of having an extended length of time to create projects is that we are able to talk about what open data projects might usefully do rather than focus on what we can create from the available data from the start.

So, we started off with a brief discussion about what we meant by Crime and Justice and what we thought was in and out of scope when setting the challenges.  Below you’ll see the flip chart that Bronwyn Goodwin was kind enough to produce from part of that discussion.

A representation of the discussion we had about the important organisations and areas within the crime and justice areas (incomplete)

We followed on from this with a range of debate that included the fears and aspirations that data publishers had when publishing open data; the current situation with open data releases and projects developed from them; what developers were interested in as well as what they are currently involved in and finally we discussed what the challenges could be.

From all of that we narrowed down three challenges that we are setting for people to tackle. They are:

How can open data projects be constructed that achieve one of the following:

- increase community involvement with the criminal justice system?

- create further evidence for what are effective interventions for rehabilitation?

- address the rise in personal crime?

The agenda, attendee list and minutes from Wednesday are all freely available. I’ll also be adding more resources that help people understand the programme and how to get involved over the coming months.

We are aware that while we had a strong attendance both from people working within the public sector and open data developers we were unsuccessful in our attempts to invite civil society groups. This includes those operating in the areas of crime prevention and victim support as well as services for prisoners and their families. Campaigning groups were also not represented. I’d be really interested in hearing the opinions and ideas from such organisations and I’ll be actively seeking those out over the coming months.

The process for taking part as an open data developer in the Crime and Justice Immersion programme is still open. Now that the challenges have been decided and published I hope more people will apply to take part. If you have any questions about what participation entails there is quite a bit of information on the Immersion Programme pages on the ODI site, but please feel free to ask me directly in the comments here or on Twitter.

This post was originally published on the ODI blog

I spent a few days in Amsterdam the other week, attending a meeting of the Cross Innovation project that is being led by Birmingham City University. The project has 11 cities taking part and they are looking into policies that can help the creative industries influence other types of business, especially in more traditional areas of the economy.

One of the ways the project is going to attempt this is by looking at brokerage, which they define as being “services offered by agencies that facilitate connections between sectors and individual firms where none previously existed”. The brokerage services that the project has looked into are often events.

It made me think how different events I have hosted and attended are constructed. Also, I thought about how much or little they focus on outcomes.

I really enjoy the unconference format. Here there is no set agenda, just a title for the event to frame what might be discussed. The first part of the event is dedicated to deciding the agenda for the day. Unconferences are quite purist in their construction and the closest I’ve seen to anybody codifying them is this:

1. The people who come are the best people who could have come.
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.
3. It starts when it starts.
4. It’s over when it’s over.
5. The Law of Two Feet (“If you are not learning or contributing to a talk or presentation or discussion it is your responsibility to find somewhere where you can contribute or learn”).

Taken from http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/UnConference_’Rules’

To my mind this is the sort of event where you stay as far away from setting any outcomes as you can. Experience tells me that some people will come along and tell you that the format is just great, but if you were just to tweak it one little bit then you’d start to see some real outcomes.

But if you tweak an unconference it becomes something else. And it’s not that an unconference doesn’t have real outcomes, it’s more the case that they aren’t set.  A lot of the purpose is the exchange of ideas and the chance to meet other like-minded people working in a similar area of work.

Having established HyperWM, our annual local government unconference in the West Midlands, we wanted to keep up the momentum we felt had been established. We didn’t want to run an unconference every 2-3 months though, so we established Brewcamp.

These are bi-monthly events that travel around the West Midlands, aimed at people who work in, or are interested in the work of, local government. Each event will have three speakers who will talk about some work they have done, or a topic that interests them. This is an adaptation of teacamps, which describe themselves as:

informal gatherings for digital people who work in and around government and also outside of government .  They are usually two hours long including a slot for a speaker and chatting over a cup of tea, hence the name ‘teacamp’.

We strongly discourage the use of presentations, preferring it when people use their talk to lead into a discussion that everybody can contribute to. But we do ask people to take some time to think about what they want to speak about and as a result we have something that starts to look a bit like an agenda before we meet.

We also put quite a bit of thought into the speakers we choose. We want Brewcamp events to be supportive environments, but we also want to avoid it becoming a mutual back-slapping exercise and we aim to have at least one challenging speaker per event.

The other type of events that I’ve been involved in recently have been hack days and weekends. In recent years the open data hack has become quite popular, sometimes with organisations making some of their data available for people to hack with. Here I think there is often more of an expectation that something tangible will result from the event. After all, the express purpose of hacking is to create something.

I’ve experienced quite different approaches towards organising hacks, some of which has developed over time. At their most simple/least organised, they might just be a group of people getting together with a few ideas and trying to create some kind of software application.

When I was working in Digital Birmingham and we wanted to host a Random Hacks of Kindness hack, we were mainly interested in how digital technologies could help during a crisis. So, we asked Birmingham Resilience, our local emergency and disaster planning organisation to give a short talk at the start of the event. They described their work and some scenarios they felt could be helped by digital technologies.

As a result a proof-of-concept application was built that enabled Birmingham Resilence and the emergency services to open and close muster points and direct people to their closest centre during an emergency, such as a flood. This was not a piece of work that was then followed up. I think this was because our outcome was to raise awareness of the possibilities of digital technologies and nothing more than that.

As such, it was a success.

As people have become more mature in their thinking about what a hack might achieve they have thought about the ways they can organise them to get what they want. For instance, Rewired State have a good overview of the different types of hack day they will arrange. These might have intended outcomes from the following:

• demonstrating the concept
• giving developers exposure that could lead to paid work
• helping a political or social cause
• as part of a company’s research & development
• introducing ideas from the digital/creative sector to other sectors of the economy
• creating a network.

Last year I was involved in the Arts DevLab which was put together by Lara Ratnaraja and Big Cat and supported by Rebel Uncut as part of the Hello Culture 2012 programme of events. It was also supported again by Digital Birmingham, building on their previous experiences of organising hack events.

Here, there were a couple of main outcomes in mind. Firstly, a softer one which involved actively brokering conversations and relationships between arts and cultural organisations. Secondly, helping them move past an idea or a proof-of-concept to a project, by making them aware of a variety of opportunities including funding possibilities.

This involved a lot more than just putting geeks in a room with creatives. Instead there was a programme for the first day, towards the end of which people were forming partnerships and starting to do some work on potential projects. By the end of the hack we had some proof-of-concept work completed, but more importantly we had brokered some relationships with people who otherwise would almost certainly not have met each other.

Out of this we know that some people are doing work together already, one project is putting a funding bid together for Nesta’s Digital R&D Fund for the Arts and one of the technology companies has been working with the University of Birmingham’s Digital Heritage Demonstrator project.

All of these outcomes are successes for the ArtsDevLab.

The above is a somewhat meandering summary of quite different events. While all of them involve brokerage, they all look quite different to each other. I’ve an inkling that they can be broken down and categorized further in useful ways, but for now I’ll end with something succinct.

In summary, and this might be stating the obvious somewhat, the more specific and determined your outcomes are, the more structured and planned your brokerage/event needs to be.

I also think that using the phrase is often a way of excluding people from the discussion. This was a useful opportunity to prove to myself that it’s possible to talk about open data in a way that is easy to understand for people who don’t want to know anything about the technical details.

I think that’s pretty much most people.

So, here it is. It is essentially me talking about three projects I’ve been involved with: the Birmingham Civic Dashboard, AidView and some ongoing work I’m doing with Mike Cummins about secondary school admissions.

I found the experience a lot of fun, if a little nerve wracking. I know that I have a tendency to waffle and so doing a talk where I had to stick to 20 seconds per slide was quite challenging. I just about managed it, although I think I stumble a bit over the last few slides.

Many thanks to Janet Vaughan for coercing me to come along and join in. Pecha Kucha Coventry have their own Vimeo channel where you can see all of the presentations from the evening and I’d heartily recommend doing so.

On the 15th November I’ll be going along, and probably talking, at the Chamberlain Forum‘s round table discussion on how open data and communication can help support a Co-operative Council. I’ve been involved in some work on open education data that I’ll be using as an example for that discussion.

The following Monday is our third HyperWM event. HyperWM is an unconference for local government in the West Midlands. As I write this there are still some tickets remaining but they might not be there for long. This year our hosts and sponsors are Sandwell Borough Council and we will be spending the afternoon at The Public in West Bromwich talking about how digital technologies can help us do things better in local government.

I really enjoy the spontaneous feel of an unconference, which is where the participants decide the agenda and pitch to run the sessions at the start of the event. It leads to a lot more enthusiasm about the subject matter and support for other people and their work. It proves that working life isn’t all about Apprentice-like competition, but is far more productive (and fun) when you work in collaboration with others.

Later that week I’ll be spending a couple of days attending Hello Culture. It’s one thing I’ve continued to be involved in since leaving Digital Birmingham, mainly because I’ve enjoyed the previous events so much. I also need to be there because I’ll be chairing the panel on digital and cultural collaborations. Come along and watch me ramble….

Also there at Hello Culture will be IC tomorrow, a Technology Strategy Board programme that “….stimulates innovation and economic growth in the digital sector, by breaking down barriers and opening doors for a new generation of entrepreneurs.”

There is an opportunity for 10 businesses to present at their ‘Meet The Innovators 3′ session which will be held on Wednesday November 21. It’s a chance to pitch an idea to a group of cultural organisations and also in front of the people running the IC Tomorrow programme.

Pitchers will also get to meet other people doing interesting digital work within culture and the arts. One organisation will also get a £5000 award to trial their idea with an organisation that IC Tomorrow will match them with.

The group I was with tackled a number of challenges relating to traceability of aid flows. In plain language traceability is being able to follow the money from a donor organisation or government right through to an individual activity or project in a recipient country.

One of the ideas put forward was that you might be able to visualise £100 given as aid and follow that through to see where it gets spent. People were especially interested in how much of it is spent on administration and consultancy compared with the amount spent on the actual project in the recipient country.

Because I’ve been working with aidinfo on the International Aid Transparency Initiative recently I was especially interested to see how IATI data could help traceability. There are a number of tools that we used to do this.

• The IATI Registry, which is “an index of data published on international development activities. The registry itself stores no data, but provides a searchable index of metadata, feeds, and links to datasets hosted by donor agencies, development organisations and partner countries.”
• There is the query API for the eXist datastore of IATI activity files that Kit Wallace has created for aidinfo.
• AidView is an application that visualises the data from that datastore in a simple to use way.

The people I was with chose to look at aid going to Tanzania. We tried to follow a few example projects through and I’ll talk about one below. The reason we chose Tanzania was because our whole group was looking at East Africa and we were aware of the Twaweza project which has created a Tanzania Budget Visualisation Dashboard.

The IATI standard allows publishers to record a number of organisations that might be involved in a development activity. They are the funding organisation, the extending organisation and the implementing organisation. It was the implementing organisations that we concentrated on as they are the closest to a project on the ground.

One of the example projects we looked at is this frame agreement that the Finnish government has with one of their Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), Suomen Lähetysseura ry. Now, the first obvious problem here is that we had no idea initially what Suomen Lähetysseura ry is or does. The IATI Registry keeps a listing of all IATI data publishers, but, as an implementing organisation, Suomen Lähetysseura ry aren’t necessarily donors themselves. They haven’t published anyway which meant we Googled their name.

From that we found out that they are the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission (FELM). Reading the project description in AidView we saw that the description of this development activity was

Rainbow School Outreach Programme. Supporting disabled children and their families. Giving the children possibility to attend special school and educating the parents on different disabilities.

A search on the FELM website doesn’t give a result for Rainbow, although it does have a page which describes the organisation’s work in Tanzania.

A search for Rainbow School, Tanzania, again through Google, gives a listing on the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs site for an Irente Rainbow School. Now this looks like it is the same project, but nowhere in the IATI data is there a reference to Irente.  Also, the budget figures show as being €27,900 for 2011, whereas IATI data shows a commitment of $139,791 over the three year life of the project. No financial transaction data has so far been published to IATI and so it is pretty much impossible to understand how those figures relate to each other.

Although we were then able to find a website for Irente Rainbow School, in Tanzania, supported by FELM, a search on the API for projects in Tanzania that have Rainbow in their description shows us that CAFOD are running some HIV and AIDS projects out of Rainbow Centres and a search on Google for “Rainbow School, Tanzania” threw up a German “African-Rainbow” project, also in Tanzania.

This really does highlight the need for data completeness and quality for open data (in general) and IATI (specifically) to approach its potential.

Completeness

The data we had gave us an excellent start in tracing individual flows of aid. However, because the structured data published doesn’t show a complete trail then we had to resort to searching in a much less structured manner to try and trace the individual projects that were recieving the aid on the ground.

There wasn’t a great deal of financial data within this particular IATI file. This meant that we could do a trace that made the delivery of this aid activity more transparent. It didn’t really allow us to scrutinise it and certainly not to the extent of tracking where the money was being spent. There were other activities we traced where a lot more financial transaction data was available.

Quality

In the example the description was imprecise about what and where the actual project activity was. I suspect this is because within FELM it is well known and so it is unnecessary to record it explicitly in the description. If so, this highlights how organisations will have to consider the different requirements for data within their own, closed world databases compared with the additional context often required when data are published openly on the web.

There are a lot of people working hard to improve the quality of IATI data. This time last year the focus was very much on encouraging organisations to publish, and while that work is still ongoing there is an increased emphasis now being placed on data quality by the IATI Technical Advisory Group, with support from the team at aidinfo.

It will be very interesting in coming years to attempt similar exercises in tracing aid flows to see the effect of these improvements.

Finally, I think I should say that no criticism of the Finnish government or FELM is implied by this post. In fact, they are used as an example because they provided some rich data for us to work with.

With thanks to Simon Parrish, Alan Upstone, Sander van der Waal, Kenneth Ross, Laura Newman, Mark Wainwright and the other people on our team for the weekend. Also thanks to Kim Borrowdale for pointing out Julia Chandler’s excellent post about the challenge.

aidinfo are one of a number of supporters of the Development Data Challenge at The Guardian offices at the end of August. Co-ordinated by Mark Brough from Publish What You Fund, it promises to be a stimulating weekend of data wrangling and visualising.

Having spent the last few months getting up to speed on what people are doing in this area I’m really looking forward to seeing what people create over the two days.

The idea for the weekend of activities is to bring together hacks and hackers, developers and development experts, to answer interesting and difficult questions about international development – and in the process, demonstrate the value of the open aid data that is now being published.

There are still some places left for developers who want to take part in the hack weekend. You can also ask your own questions or set challenges for the Development Data Challenge.

So, can I FOI Service Birmingham now?

This was because, while the Open Data white paper can be viewed as a continuation of policies which develop our right to open data, we are also going through a period where the organisations which provide public services are being dispersed, often out of the public sector itself.

Whether it is privately owned health providers or social enterprises delivering local authority contracts, more and more of the organisations which hold and create the data produced in the course of public services are exempt from Freedom of Information legislation.

My question about Service Birmingham being FOI-able is because it is a private company established by Birmingham City Council and Capita to run the city’s IT infrastructure and services. To the best of my knowledge it has always resisted Freedom of Information requests, claiming exemption on the basis of it being a private enterprise.

Off the top of my head, in Birmingham we also have the following

• Amey - A trans national company, whose parent Ferrovial are based in Spain, which has just embarked on a 25 year Private Finance Initiative contract to run the city’s highways network.

• The new Library of Birmingham is now a charitable trust and so is exempt from Freedom of Information legislation.

• Where I live in Balsall Heath is one of three localism pilots in the city where community organisations and housing associations are going to control Community Budgets. My understanding is that Balsall Heath Forum is exempt under the Freedom of Information Act.

• Acivico is a Wholly Owned Company that has been spun out of Birmingham’s Property Services. Their website says “Acivico Ltd is a company created by Birmingham City Council to offer a range of services to the council and other public and private sector organisations.”. As a wholly owned company they ought to have the same obligations as all other public authorities in complying with the Freedom Of Information Act [launches PDF], but I don’t think this has been tested yet.

And there are bound to be more in Brum that I’ve forgotten or not heard of.

It’s worth stating at this point that not all of these organisations are antipathetic towards open data. Amey have supplied at least one response to an FOI request based on their Birmingham contract and I know from work I’ve done with the new Library of Birmingham that they are interested in the possibilities it offers them. Whether any organisation would willingly respond to some of the more challenging and confrontational FOI requests that are made is questionable though.

So, when the white paper came out last week I was keen to see what it had to say about this issue. All I could find was this, tucked away neatly in the appendix:

The scope of the FOIA is an issue that has been raised in evidence to the Justice Select Committee during post-legislative scrutiny of the Act. The Government will consider any recommendations of the Committee before bringing forward any proposals for future policy in relation to the FOIA. With regard to transparency outside the FOIA, the Open Public Services White Paper of July 2011 highlighted the need to strike the right balance between greater service provision in collaboration with private and civil society organisations and continuous transparency. The Government is mindful that transparency should be proportionate, bearing in mind potential burdens on provider organisations (especially small businesses and charitable organisations). In taking forward transparency and open government, we will, by the end of this year, set out how best we can achieve greater transparency by providers.

So, it’s not in their scope, they will take on the recommendations of the committee, but It’s Complicated.

It looks as though open data is brushing up against other interests here. The government has an ideological commitment to what it refers to as the decentralisation of service provision. Above it is implicitly saying this will trump open data.

Another way of putting this is that for our government it’s more important to move services away from being provided by the public sector than it is to ensure the transparency and scrutiny of those services.

I’d argue that now is the very time when transparency and scrutiny are most important.

So, at this weekend’s Local Gov Camp I’m going to facilitate a session where we talk about how we scrutinise these new decentralised services and the role that open data can play in doing that. I’d like it to include a mapping exercise from those present of where services are being spun out in their authorities and what the responses to any FOI requests have been.

If you have any examples you’d like to see included in this then please add them in the comments.