Overview of opendata politics in the UK and how to build your own data store for no money with no coding in no time. final slide details steps to DIY data store

1. DIY Data Store WMRO #wmod10 event 15July 2010 William Perrin - william@talkaboutlocal.org Talk About Local (West Midlands) Ltd http://talkaboutlocal.org/faq William Perrin TAL

2. 1984 - Freedom of Information Campaign starts up

3. Gordon Brown Tim Berners-Lee 2009

4. Maintain momentum

6. "Getting council business out in the open will revolutionise local government. Local people should be able to hold politicians and public bodies to account over how their hard earned cash is being spent and decisions made on their behalf. They can only do that effectively if they have the information they need at their fingertips. Organisations that might have been effectively locked out before, including voluntary sector and small business, will be in a much stronger position to pitch for contracts and bring new ideas and solutions to the table." @dominiccampbell "there are no rules, we want to see what you can do, your innovation" - @ericpickles #localgov

10. The ‘Crackavan’ Rufford Street c2002 In front of my house Pics – Mark Bailey

11. Public Sector Information in action Brand new street light broken for 163 days Someone isn’t living up to contract From snagging to failure Can performance data help hold to account?

12. 2007-2008 Took a lifetime to find basic relevant information on web Street light repair – Islington average 26.5 days v 163 here Lever for getting things done Light gets fixed due to this and other factors

13. Abandoned cars and weekly arson Bingfield Park, Rufford Street 2002 In front of my house Pics – Mark Bailey

14. This 2010 open data would have been priceless in 2002 when fighting acute arson problem in Caledonian Ward

15. Towards a DIY datastore – first catch your data

16. Towards a DIY datastore – store your data

17. Towards a DIY datastore – publish links to your data

18. DIY data store: no cash, no programming , no brainer First catch your data –www.whatdotheyknow.com For tips on what data to ask for go to London Data Store and ask your council for what London publishes, in machine readable form such as CSV or excel spreadsheet Put in two requests a day for data citing and linking to Eric Pickles and David Cameron’s statements. Use whatdotheyknow.com Ask in the right way. Either – ask nicely if you think the LA will publish or you have a relationship. Or copy some of my aggressive FOI request language in whatdotheyknow, borrowed from Heather Brooke. Get some mates to help you to spread load and prevent ‘nuisance’ issues Send an email to the Leader of the Council explaining what you are doing – a common courtesy. Then if the Council plays up, FOI what s/he does with the email internally Store the data – whatdotheyknow.com and google docs Set up a free Google mail account and use google docs – put CSV data you receive in a Google sheet and click to publish/share the sheet (this gives it a URL accessible over the interweb etc). If they give you pdfs you can store them there too. Publish the data Go to Wordpress.com and set up a simple free blog, use the standard theme and don’t fanny about making it look pretty Call blog e.g. opendatamidfordshire.wordpress.com – will quickly rise up Google Give it a simple title – Midfordshire Data Store – helps with Google Create categories in the blog for the types of data you are requesting As you get each new piece of data store it in google docs, then write a short blog post explaining what data and what format it is in your wordpress blog, with link to google docs and whatdotheyknow.com Tell people about it and get them to link to you