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Open Data Camp: 7 up!

Sarah Roberts, who is a member of the team at Swirrl, one of our Bronze Sponsors, has written about Open Data Camp 7 on Swirrl’s blog. Here’s what she said.

We’re happy to be sponsoring Open Data Camp again, which heads to London the weekend of Nov 2nd and 3rd. In honour of the seventh edition of the camp, here are seven recent bits of data discussion which have caught our eye …

In at Number One

Image Source

The recently published Northern Ireland Open Data Strategy, is straight in at Number 1. The strategy runs from 2020–2023 and has four main themes:

  • Increasing the rate of publication and sharing of government information as open data
  • Promoting original, useful ways of using open data to show its benefits.
  • Engaging with the public sector to promote Open Data through events, setting up an innovation fund and running open data competitions
  • Training so Open Data’s a business function, rather than an ad hoc activity.

There’s a lot of interesting content in the strategy, and it’s especially great to see ‘making data accessible and easy to use’ as one of its key principles. And a mention of tidy data. Be still my beating data heart.

Two: Sweet Harmony

And tidy data makes me think of another good thing going on with open data : The Connected Open Government Statistics project. This is a GSS project which aims to harmonise data across departments so it’s interoperable. There’s a lot of good stuff going on here to tackle the disparate data landscape in a standardised way and a lot of organisations involved. More on this here.

Three: Stand(ards) and Deliver

Stand and Deliver by Adam and the Ants. Image Source

I don’t go to many conferences, but those I have been to this year have all included AI as a topic. I was talking about this to my colleague, Jamie Whyte, who said one similarity between AI and data science is that they both depend on the quality of data they operate on. Bill Roberts spoke about the same thing from a different angle at our Power of Data event a couple of weeks ago: the idea that if you want to do data science you need some data, most likely from lots of data sources. And if that data’s not in a good shape when it goes it, then the risk is that automation will generate poor quality results. Standards at the point of publication are the answer here — not Adam and the Ants, really. But enjoy the ear worm.

Four: Never Ending Story

Storytelling with data. I know, it’s not new but it’s still something that hooks me in. At the recent GSS conference in Edinburgh, Mark Robinson of NHS Health Scotland presented a really engaging talk on the use of data in interventions for health inequalities. He showed this Shiny app (screenshot below) in his talk, which allows users to select the area & health outcome they want to look at:

5ive

I’m totally showing my age now, I know. Image Source

In at number five are the Indices of Deprivation. This data was released last month by MHCLG and Bowie Penney covered some of its uses at the same GSS conference. The uses are wide ranging, from contextual funding use to estimating life expectancy, and people are already making stuff with it, like Open Data Manchester’s lava lamp visualisationRob Fry’s interactive map and Alasdair Rae’s work. Get to the IMD postcode apparea app and the Indices of deprivation datasets here.

Six: Stop, Collaborate and Listen

Slide from Jeni Tennison’s talk at Power of Data 2019

The Open Data Institute have been doing a lot of work around the idea of data institutions for the new data age. I love the Data Access Map (shown) and other related work includes research on Data Trusts and a joint paper with the RSA & Luminate on data rights and data ownership. Open Data Camp’s a huge collaborative effort and there’s another opportunity to meet up with people collaborative style at the next cross-government API meeting in Newcastle next month.

Seven: One Vision

Not the catchy Queen song (although, what a song) — the National Data Strategy. We were lucky enough to have Gaia Marcus, who heads up the strategy at DCMS, chair a panel on this at our event a couple of weeks ago. Panelists included Rosalie MarshallSiân ThomasGavin Freeguard and our very own Bill and questions ranged from opportunities to improve public services through effective data use to priorities of data standards and data infrastructures. The videos will be up very soon — worth a watch!

This time Swirrler, and long time Open Data Camp supporter, Jen will be there — say hi if you see her there!

 

Hendrik Grothuis

Obituary: Hendrik Grothuis

By Gesche Schmid

Originally posted on LinkedIn,  August 20, 2018.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hendrikg/

I learned with great sadness of Hendrik Grothuis’ sudden death. He was a colleague, friend and a great advocate who championed open data insight with spirit and integrity.

 I met Hendrik many years ago when he was a researcher at Cambridgeshire County Council interested in analytics, data and geographic information. We were reviving the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) Local Public Services Interest Group to advocate the value and importance of geospatial information in connecting people and places and deriving insight. Hendrik took over the helm of the Group in 2010.

Hendrik and I worked together again for the Making open data work for you initiative led by the Local Government Association to engage with local communities and drive innovation and economic growth. Hendrik set-up the Cambridgeshire Insight and Open Data partnership, developed a data portal and shared his knowledge enthusiastically with the open data community. He became a cofounder of the Open Data Camp and a member of the Open Data User Group in 2014 to represent Local Government. He then advocated Open Insight for Smart Cities before working for the University of London at the Layers of London Project.

Again our path crossed just a few months ago when Hendrik was looking for new opportunities and very recently he became a delivery manager in the Defra data programme taking forward several data innovation projects. He brought to the programme drive, enthusiasm and a wealth of knowledge and expertise.

Hendrik combined a hard working attitude with pragmatism and wit. He was a great collaborator and able to pick up situations quickly, listened and offered his valuable advice. He shared what he knew on social media and was always open for finding out more over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.

Hendrik, you will be hugely missed at work, in the community and as a friend.

Gesche Schmid

Open Data Camp – 10 out of 10. Would attend again

This post was originally published on the ONS Digital blog

In October this year a group of like-minded folks will be meeting at Queen’s University in Belfast to chat about open data. They will be doing so under the banner of Open Data Camp, an unconference for those interested in making information from a wide range of sources “open”.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of an unconference, it is a format based more around peer-to-peer learning, creativity and collaboration.

In the context of this unconference, open can mean many things. In the depths of the technicalities of machine readable serialisation, the legality of data reuse, or how to convince your boss that making information available in only PDFs tends to be, shall we say, sub-optimal.

The reason I am writing this post here on @onsdigital is because I am pleased to say we are sponsoring Open Data Camp. We get asked to be involved in a lot of different conferences, but are not able to say yes to many, so I wanted to write a little about why this one is important to us and what we hope to gain from the weekend.

Primarily, we do this because we care about this community hugely and want to help ensure events like this can be financially viable. We also do it because ONS data being open is important if we are to ensure the greatest possible social and economic benefits for the public.

I’ve written about some of this over in my own blog, but don’t take my word for it, listen to Sir Tim during his Ted talk .

As part of this, Tim suggests:

“What you find if you deal with people in government departments is that they hug their database, hold it really close, so that they can build a beautiful website to present it.

I would like to suggest: sure, make a beautiful website, but first, give us – all of us – the unadulterated data. We have to ask for raw data now.”

I still regard this as pretty much the most important statement anyone has made about what the digital relationship between the citizen and the state is and what it could be.

Here at ONS we have been thinking about this a lot, have done some things that hopefully start us in the right direction for opening things up and know we have an awful lot more ground to cover.

We started with defining (with the help of Leigh Dodds) some open data publishing principles.

We are using these to inform the work we are currently doing on a project we are referring to as “Customise My Data”. This is a project to make some fairly fundamental changes to the way we publish data. The goals are to ensure that we move away from being an organisation that publishes excel and into one that publishes a consistent backbone of data, that allows users to breakdown our data into smaller parts and enables machine readable access to statistics (not spreadsheets)

I am hoping to pitch a session at open data camp around how we can make the data we publish through this system as open as possible and as useful for our users as we can make it.

A few final tickets for the event are going to be made available soon (it is free to attend) and I look forward to having some interesting conversations with those of you I get to meet over the weekend.

If you are unable to attend, but are interested in offering feedback on the work we are doing around open data at ONS, please get in touch with me directly, or register your interest to take part in the user research we are undertaking. We have upcoming sessions in London, Sheffield and Liverpool.

Photo available under Open Government Licence v3.0

Data Dive Event at University of York

Data Dive Event logoEveryone with an interest in designing their own games and apps is invited to come along to the University of York’s first ever “Data Dive”!

Run in collaboration with the City of York, this event will have introductory talks and discussion on July 15th, a day of design and coding on the 16th, and a round-up on the 17th, all exploring the creations of games and apps using the large amount of open data York collects, on everything from environmental issues to school attendance. It will also allow for networking with other designers, community groups, industry partners, academics, and more, and be a fun event where everyone will be able to collaborate on game and software design.

Absolutely no technical expertise required!

We look forward to seeing what you all come up with! More information can be found at https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/datadive/ and people can sign up at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/datadiveuniversity-of-york-tickets-26193048112

Draft Schedule:

Friday 15th July

1530-1600: Coffee, snacks, networking

1600-1615: Introductory talk from Dr Mark R Johnson and Dr Darren Reed (University of York)

1615-1630: Introductory talk from Ian Cunningham (City of York Council)

1630-1830: Attendees introduce themselves, initial group formation and discussion, project drafts

1830-Late: Dinner

Saturday 16th July

1000-1030: Recap on previous day, welcome to new attendees, introductions for projects formed on Friday, formation/growth of new groups, introduction to Episode project.

1030-1230: First design/coding session

1230-1330: Lunch break

1330-1730: Second design/coding session

1730-1830: Order Pizza

1830-Late: Third design/coding session

Sunday 17th July

1000-1030: Recap on event

1030-1130: Presentations from attendees on their projects

1130-?: Feedback, discussion, reflections, networking

Turning LiDAR Data into Actionable Insight

default rendering of DSM in QGIS
Default rendering of DSM in QGIS on top of OS StreetView

My pitch to Open Data Camp 3 is to demonstrate my work with LiDAR data showing how it can be used to provide insights which can improve efficiency in a variety of business sectors. Continue reading Turning LiDAR Data into Actionable Insight