Simon Whitehouse

Estimating the diagnosis of health conditions in England

September 4, 2018 By Simon Whitehouse 1 Comment

Data Unlocked are working on a project with Inside Outcomes and Birmingham City University to estimate the rate of diagnosis of over twenty health conditions in England using openly available datasets. In this blog post Simon Whitehouse explains how we have made our estimations.

Earlier this year we spoke with Darren Wright of Inside Outcomes about the possibility of estimating the diagnosis of health conditions in England by area, something we were surprised wasn’t already available.

The National Health Service (NHS) do produce statistics, called Quality Outcome Framework (QOF) measures, that break down the prevalence of diagnosis of twenty five different health conditions from Atrial Fibrillation to Stroke, by GP practice.

They also produce statistics about the number of patients registered in GPs practices, broken down by the Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA) they live in.Continue Reading

Discussing council budgets at UK Gov Camp

January 23, 2018 By Simon Whitehouse Leave a Comment

UKGovCamp Word Cloud

UKGovCamp 2018

Last Saturday I attended UK Gov Camp – an event for people interested in how the public sector makes the best uses of digital technologies. It has an open format, with the agenda decided by the participants. At the start of the day everyone has the chance to stand up and “pitch” their idea for a session.

Data Unlocked are going to be data partners for The Bureau Local‘s Big Council Budget Hack which is happening at five centres around the country on Saturday, 3rd February. So, I pitched a session to discuss council budgets and what attendees thought would be useful information for members of the public and journalists attending the hack day.

The raw session notes were taken by Graeme Jones from OpenMindly. I have adapted them below to include my thoughts and to focus on just three questions that were raised.Continue Reading

The Big Council Budget Hack – West Midlands

January 19, 2018 By Simon Whitehouse Leave a Comment

We are very happy to announce that we will be The Bureau Local’s data partners for their Big Council Budget Hack – West Midlands event on Saturday 3rd February at Coventry University’s Ellen Terry Building.

This Bureau Local investigation “is bringing together budget data for each of England’s 353 councils to find out what makes the cut – and what doesn’t – ahead of the government’s next set of funding decisions in March.”

The Big Council Budget Hack – West Midlands

Open Data Manchester have the onerous task of completing a technical review of all the data beforehand. We will be on hand at the Coventry event to help people explore the data and find the answers to any questions they might have.

The sign up is on Eventbrite. If you are coming along and already know what you are interested in then please let us know in the comments and we will try and do some preparatory work beforehand.

Who Owns Birmingham? – December Event

December 15, 2017 By Simon Whitehouse 4 Comments

Image by West Midlands Police (Flickr: Can you identify this aerial shot?) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Who owns small, unloved pockets of land in Birmingham’s inner city? Why are so many properties owned by companies located at one address on Jersey? Where’s the most expensive car parking space in England and Wales? Are there a significant number of overseas companies owning land in England and Wales who also appear in the Panama and Paradise Papers?
These were just a few of the questions explored this Tuesday, 12th December by people and groups at Data Unlocked’s Who Owns Birmingham event.

This Tuesday we held our first Who Owns Birmingham event at Innovation Birmingham. This follows the Land Registry’s recent release of data about land and property ownership in England and Wales.

The release includes a little over three and a half million records of land and property in England and Wales owned by companies, local authorities, county councils and other organisations. Private individuals and charities are the two categories not published.Continue Reading

Land Registry Open Data Release

December 8, 2017 By Simon Whitehouse Leave a Comment

Land Registry by Jonathon Rolande from Pixabay

At the start of November the Land Registry released data about corporate and overseas property ownership in England and Wales. In all there are roughly three and a half million rows of data about commercial and corporate property ownership and a little under one hundred thousand rows of data on overseas property ownership.

That’s a lot of data and we think there are bound to be some interesting stories in there.

What have we done?

Open Data Camp – Data as Art session

November 2, 2017 By Simon Whitehouse Leave a Comment

Myself and Mike Cummins went to Belfast the other weekend for Open Data Camp 5. The following is a write up and some thoughts about the session that Amy Evans from Open Data Institute (ODI) Leeds ran on Open Data and Art.

The Session: Open Data As Art

Amy started by introducing herself. She is the social media and communications lead at ODI Leeds as well as being their go to person for visual work. She has a background in Visual Communication, specifically Illustration.

Amy highlighted the Big Bang Data exhibition at Somerset House as being an example of open data art and said that her interest in running the session was to discover other examples.Continue Reading

Open Data Standards – School Admissions

October 20, 2017 By Simon Whitehouse Leave a Comment

Birmingham School Finder

Data Unlocked have long had our Schools Finder project that aims to improve the school admissions process here in Birmingham.

It allows you to put your address or post code in and from that it will create a map showing the cut off distances for schools in your area over the previous years. While it can’t tell you for definite that you will or won’t be successful, it helps parents and carers in their decision making by giving an indication of recent trends.

We are currently updating the Birmingham School Finder, so apologies for not being able to link to a live example, our current working copy has data up to 2014 and includes historic trends. It covers both primary and secondary school admissions.

As part of this work we have written a series of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests. We did this after reading and using a fair few local authority school admission documents, comparing the information they contained.Continue Reading

Birmingham School Admissions – 2014

October 9, 2014 By Simon Whitehouse Leave a Comment

For the past couple of years Data Unlocked have produced a tool to help parents and carers applying for school places for their children in the following year.

It allows you to put your address or post code in and from that it will create a map showing the cut off distances for schools in your area over the previous years. While it can’t tell you for definite that you will or won’t be successful, it helps parents in their decision making by giving an indication of recent trends. You can go to the map by clicking on the image below.

Share PSI workshop in Lisbon – call for papers

October 3, 2014 By Simon Whitehouse Leave a Comment

Following its first workshop on Samos during the summer, the Share PSI network are preparing for their second meeting in Lisbon. This will be 3-4 December at the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering.

The second workshop is entitled “Encouraging open data usage by commercial developers” which is a subject of some interest to Data Unlocked, and so I’m really pleased to be going there to represent Birmingham.

If you are interested in attending there are several ways in which you can participate:Continue Reading

Data Unlocked goes to Greece – Share PSI network report

September 15, 2014 By Simon Whitehouse 1 Comment

Share-PSI 2.0 is “the European network for the exchange of experience and ideas around implementing open data policies in the public sector”. It consists of 44 partners from 25 countries, including Birmingham City Council. Through my work with the West Midlands Open Data Forum I was invited by Digital Birmingham to attend the kick off meeting in April and then the recent workshop which formed part of this year’s Samos Summit.

The Share PSI Network

The Samos workshop had the title “Uses of open data within government for innovation and efficiency” and consisted of a wide range of presentations, a mini-bar camp and a project meeting. Amanda Smith from the Open Data Institute has already written a post about the workshop and an extensive report of the proceedings has been written up by Phil Archer, the project’s technical co-ordinator from the W3C.

So, instead of a report back, here are just four of the things I took away from the Samos workshop:Continue Reading