Data Unlocked

Bringing data to life

Discussing council budgets at UK Gov Camp

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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.

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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

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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 with Bureau Local

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

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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

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

Open Data Standards – School Admissions

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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.

Birmingham-Secondary-Schools-Finder

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

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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.

Birmingham-Secondary-Schools-Finder

Continue Reading

Share PSI workshop in Lisbon – call for papers

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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

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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 Logo

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

West Midlands European Elections 2014

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Last week we collected and visualised the data for the local elections. To be complete, we have now scraped the European election results and made a Tableau visualisation of them.

The electoral process is different for the European Elections, as it is a form of Proportional Representation. Also, the results are more widely scattered on the map, this makes it more difficult to visualise and I think this makes it less clear than the Local Elections.

One thing I’ve added is a table showing the percentage of the vote per party for each of the electoral areas on the map. Because the numbers of people voting varies so much across areas this table is probably the best for seeing where particular parties are strongest. See if you can guess where UKIP got the highest proportion of votes in the West Midlands…..

If I get time, it would be nice to code the maps with LeafletJS as it has better panning. If you click and hold on the map below for a couple of seconds you will, eventually, be able to move the map around.

As for the local elections, the raw data is stored in the Open Data West Midlands Store.

Birmingham Local Elections 2014

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I was fortunate to be able to see the count for Birmingham Local Elections this year (thank you @bccnewsroom).

Birmingham Council were very quick to publish the results on their web page, but unfortunately they did this using tables. That doesn’t make it terribly easy for anybody to come along, grab the data and reuse it in any way.

So, I wrote a quick scraper and collected the data into a CSV file which I placed in the West Midlands Open Datastore. By doing this it means that anybody can take that file, import it into another programme, such as spreadsheet software, and do some analysis on it.

I decided to use Tableau to create a quick visualisation, which you can see below. Each pie chart shows the breakdown of votes cast in the ward with the size of the pie chart determined by the total number of votes cast in the ward.


 

The data visualisation guru, @CarolineBeavon has kindly added a much more user friendly view:

If you select a party from the drop down box at the top, the map on the left will update to show you where they received their votes. The map on the right shows which party won in each ward across the city.

Further down (you may need to scroll) on the left is a breakdown of the votes cast in each ward and on the right the total number of votes cast for each party across the city.

Creating a visualisation that helps people explore election results isn’t easy. We hope what we’ve done is useful and welcome suggestions of other ways that it might be done.

Four interesting facts about school admissions in Birmingham

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According to The Guardian, this year 70.3% of Birmingham parents/carers “won” a place for their child at their first place secondary school. That’s a pretty good percentage, although it is apparently down by 3% on last year.

At Data Unlocked we’ve being doing work on school admissions, especially in Birmingham, for a number of years now. Following a recent Freedom of Information request we have been able to break down how children from Birmingham get into Birmingham secondary schools, based on the selection criteria.

Birmingha School Admissions

Birmingham Secondary School Admissions, by criteria, 2013

To clarify: this is children in Birmingham who are offered a place at a Birmingham secondary school. Children from outside Birmingham and Birmingham children who travel to school outside Birmingham, aren’t included in these figures.

From this, we’ve pulled out four interesting facts, or observations:Continue Reading