LocalGov 2.0

Fingal County Council, Dublin City Council and a range of other partners recently hosted Ireland's first Open Data Challenge. An 18 hour event using local open data to create useful applications and services for people in Ireland. The winning projects included one that could help business find optimum locations and another for data folk helping to refine and link non-standardised data sets. Nice.

Fingal County Council was ground breaking in its publication of open data and still has one of the most impressive local open data sets around.

Just a quick one! Type in your postcode, address or council name and be taken to your council's expenditure data.

The region of Catalonia has an amazing open data site with an English version! In a quick look around the beautiful and easily navigable site, it appears to be acting as more than a registry (a place which indexes links to data sets at host sites). You can download some data.

There aren't tons and tons of data sets yet, but there is a comprehensive smattering of interesting and useful information some of it which would fall into the transparency and accountability category.

I like how their data isn't limited to numbers and text fields, but includes visual data as well - archived video and images - there are maps as well as geographic information.

They also have a section on featured data apps and web services which help a user who isn't able to configure sparql queries navigate the data held and registered on the site.

The Sunshine Review is an organisation in the US which is evaluating transparency on state and local government websites in the US. They have a clear set of criteria for publishing transparency information and a 10 item checklist that they review and grade.

With some adjustment, these criteria would be just as useful in a local government checklist in the UK for measuring transparency information on websites.

Their exemplar authority is Anderson County, South Carolina - who proudly display their A+ grading on their transparency pages as well as the actual information. South Carolina made some significant strides in publishing transparency information
as I wrote about here a year ago.

Earlier this week - on Valentine's Day (which happens to be Condom Awareness Day as well, apparently) New York City launched a new free condom location app. Available for Android or iPhone, the app will tell you the 5 nearest places to pick up some free French letters, as well as providing information about condom use and storage.

But there's not just an app, there's a whole social media campaign. A Facebook page, a Twitter account and several versions of YouTube videos based on tv ads (in the US tv stations are required to run public service announcements). The hip hop version must be for the Yoof demographic and the jazz version appears to be aimed at people who wear glasses.

Info on the Twitter account seems to indicate they're even about to run a contest for people to design limited edition condom wrappers, which is cool I guess - but I couldn't find any info on that on the city government website condom pages.

The "Get Some" page also includes a prominent link to the New York's social media customer use policy. Take it how you will that I found this the most interesting and compulsively replicable bit of the whole thing.

The online tech "magazine" Mashable has highlighted 5 North American examples of cities doing cool things with open data. Featuring Ottawa's open data app contest with $50k in prizes, Portland, Oregon's Civic Apps, the data Warehouse in Washington,DC - the amusingly named Big Apps2.0 from New York (see what they did there - Big Apps for the Big Apple?), and Data SF in San Francisco which has already accumulated over 60 apps developed on the city's open data.

New South Wales is developing a strategy for better use of location information, which is nice. But the way that they're doing it is even nicer. It's starting out with crowd sourcing of ideas and an unconference to generate more ideas for uses and usability of geographic information.

Right now the website is full of some fairly dense policy language:

Across Australia and internationally, governments are increasingly developing high-level strategies for the management and use of spatial information, infrastructure and services. By improving coordination, access, sharing and usability of spatial information, such strategies realise the full potential of states’ significant investments in spatial information assets. A NSW Location Strategy will thus ensure alignment with best practice. More importantly, however, it will unlock the value of spatial information – for the benefit of both NSW Government and the broader community.

But the promising approach and the reference to the use of location information by both government agencies and the public during the Queensland floods tells me that they're going to try to break out of traditional approaches to developing information strategy and that they'll be supporting some pretty creative approaches to generating, sharing and using geographic info.

One to watch.

Bristol has long been at the vanguard of local digital, embracing technology and supporting digital inclusion. You can find an extensive history of their projects and approaches at connectingbristol.org

Lately, this has included their approach to open data and working with the local developer community to use government and crowd-sourced data to make living in Bristol an even better experience. To support this, they're hosting our next Local by Social event Apps for Communities on 28 and 29 January at the historic Bristol Town Hall. At this free event on Friday the 28th you can hear more about the Bristol digital story, hear from and work with local developers and even build something useful at our Saturday hack day.

The event is free and you can attend both or either days. Sign up here. And don't worry, we won't make you wear one of those green suits!

I spent the day at the Open Government Data Camp, an international expo of open governmnt data. One of the people I met there was Dominic Byrne from Fingal County Council where they've just done a big release of local government data in accessible formats at http://data.fingal.ie/. I think he said it was around 70 data sets - everything from burial grounds to an open register of complaints (has anyone done that already?)

This was cited in an article in the Irish times today about the Hacks and Hackers Day in Dublin which is helping to turn open data like Fingal's (the first in Ireland) - into useful things for citizens and journos alike.

Lichfield DC has been doing some cool stuff with open data, but they understand that not everything has to be built by the council. But there is a role for working with developers and understanding how you can release your data and which data sets need to be released to make stuff for citzens and the council, too.

On the Lichfield site Build your stuff with our stuff they say:
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We’re always looking for new ways of making it as easy as possible for developers and website owners to access data held by Lichfield District Council in ways that they want – allowing you to remix, mashup and share data easily.

We’ve recently rebuilt this section to allow you to search for datasets, view data by category, as well as showcase work that people have been doing with our data. We’ve also added a blog, so we can share the latest news about our work in the world of open data!
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And you can follow them on Twitter, too.