Urgent: Sign up for Treasury’s COINS seminar
As I’ve previously written, the COINS database is not just a very significant release of open data, it’s also quite hard to get your head round. With this in mind, Her Majesty’s Treasury is holding a seminar on July 2 2010, from 9.30am to 12.30pm for coders and others who want to understand more about [...]
Learning about the COINS database: a few useful links
A couple of weeks ago the government did something really significant. No, it wasn’t anything to do with the Big Society – significant though that may be. It was the release of one enormous database, known as COINS. Essentially COINS (and I do really like writing it in capitals) is the detail on everything the [...]
Data scraping using Google Docs spreadsheets
Thanks to Paul Bradshaw I recently came across a post by Tony Hirst who has very helpfully provided an extraordinary lesson in the joys (and I do mean joys) of scraping data using Google Docs, which I strongly recommend following if you’re at all interested in these sorts of things and haven’t seen it (it [...]
SpeedData: Chris Taggart on Open Election Data
Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal spoke briefly during his presentation about his work with several councils to provide open election data for the elections on May 6. As Chris points out it is something of a surprise that election data isn’t just available freely. But it isn’t. Well, at least until Chris got involved. I got [...]
SpeedData: Rob Benson of BEN PCT
Rob Benson handles E-communications for Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust. During SpeedData Rob spoke about how it might be quite difficult to get some people within organisations to appreciate the reasons for making data available, particularly within an institution like the NHS where issues of privacy are particularly important. But Rob was taken [...]
SpeedData: Alex Burrows of Centro
Alex Burrows is the head of strategy at Centro, the public transport authority for the West Midlands. He explained that Centro deals with enormous amounts of data, but has until now perhaps not been as aware of some of the interesting things that other people might be prepared to do with their data. I spoke [...]
SpeedData: Jon Bounds
Jon explained why people do stuff for free on the web by talking about Cliche Kitty and Domo Kun. For those who don’t know, Cliche Kitty and Domo Kun were brought together on the internet. Have a look here. Jon described how people started to use these images and add to them and create new and [...]
SpeedData: Chris Taggart and OpenlyLocal
Chris has been working for about a year on the OpenlyLocal site, which collects information on councils and councillors across the country. He made a very interesting point immediately, saying that all good things start with a small step, trying to solve a simple question, while all the bad, expensive complicated things that don’t work, [...]
SpeedData: Nick Booth – Help Me Investigate and Social Media Surgeries
Nick talked all about how people are beginning to skill up to use the web in new and very powerful ways. First Nick pointed out that public organisations are already under considerable scrutiny – by showing a video he’d shot of traffic wardens illegally parked in his street. He then talked about Help Me Investigate [...]
SpeedData: Dave Harte
Dave was interested in creating a map for the hyperlocal blog Bornville Village. He took data from Birmingham City Council’s website on gritting. He spent a lot of time doing it, by manually taking data, creating a spreadsheet and then transferring it to a Google Map. Eventually it was taken on by Mappa Mercia who [...]
