Tag Archives: Liveblog

ODCamp 7: Thank you and goodbye

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And so, as night draws in, the latest Open Data Camp draws to a close. Thank you to all the sponsors, the camp organisers, and the campers. Open Data Camp moves around: it has now been in London, Aberdeen, Belfast, Cardiff, Bristol and Winchester. Where will it be next? That depends on… someone volunteering to take it on…

If you are interested in hosting the event, then get in touch. But, for now, catch up on all the blog posts, Tweet (using the hashtag #ODCamp), blog, and generally pass on all the good stuff from two great days. And we’ll see you at the next one.

ODCamp 7: Horror stories…

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Just a few days after Halloween, and with pumpkins adorning the refreshment tables at Open Data Camp 7, campers gathered at the end of day two to swap open data horror stories. Or, as leader Dan Barrett put it, to learn from their experiences and mistakes. Because that can be cathartic — and helpful for others.

Story one

A reflection on working at [a large public institution] and spending six years trying to improve its open data division. “I recognised that there was a division between its work and public understanding of what it did. And I thought open data could help to bridge that.” Things were going fairly well. “And then they went spectacularly badly, and the work stopped.”

What did the teller learn? “That it is important to own the story of your own work, and to think about how you tell it to other people,” particularly in an environment in which others are seeking to benefit from telling a counter-narrative, “discounting the work you do, playing down the benefits of what you do”, and diverting resources to other priorities. “So that is the lesson I am taking into a new role: Tell stories that resonate with everybody about data.”

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ODCamp 7: Getting started on a guide to getting started

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Post lunch on the second day of Open Data Camp 7, and Simon Worthington from Register Dynamics set up a practical session to making a start on a guide to getting started with open data. With sticky notes, of course. So, he asked participants, what would they have needed to know when they were getting started? And what resources would they have pointed people towards the answer those questions?

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ODCamp 7: Ten years of open data. What have we learned?

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Tim Davies has written a book: The State of Open Data (@stateofopendata) with the support of international development and open data organisations and the OD4D.net initiative.

So he wanted to run a retrospective of the first ten years of open data at Open Data Camp 7 in London: and to find out from campers what their experience had been: “the good, the bad, the in between.”

First, the book. “We recognised sometime last year that we were coming up on a decade since President Obama made a splash on open data in the US and the UK launched the Open Data Institute. So we put up some Google documents and looked at seven areas to brainstorm thoughts about what had happened in them.”

More than 200 people pitched in ideas, and commented on events and initiatives from different perspectives. Then, the authors – 40% of whom were women, and many of whom come from the global south – were asked to comment and revise what became 6,000 word chapters.

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ODCamp 7: Going green(er) with open procurement data

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Day two of Open Data Camp 7 at Geovation in London started with a session on public sector procurement data, and how it could be used to encourage green initiatives. Ian Makgill introduced the session. His company has a site that captures public tender information and makes it “freely available to everyone” and then analyses the data to say “oh look, this is how much work this company has got” or “here’s a trend in a particular kind of spending.”

However, he said, while this was interesting, it wasn’t having a big impact on organisational behaviour. But: “What we realised is that suppliers are very interested in when contracts are coming to an end. That’s understandable, but it’s also a massive leverage point at which the public could encourage procurement that reduces carbon.”

After all, government spends around £12.9 billion a year on things, and those things are responsible for about 17% of carbon output, because they are things like roads, and airports. So there should be an opportunity for experts and the public to get in and argue that setting a contract in a different way will induce change.

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