SpeedData: Dave Harte

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 continued the project around the West Midlands.

He’s proud of it, but points out that this kind of application could be much easier to create. He was happy to spend his time doing it, but the data could be in an easy-to-use format, which would be easy to make into

Dave says: ‘The point is that dull data is really interesting even if it is only interesting at a particular point. you can produce interesting stuff which can contribute to a debate – however dull the initial data is.’