If you get a moment, pop over to OpenlyLocal and have a look around, will you?

It’s a very good start – showing how all of the investment in data standards is beginning to find it’s own tipping point.

It is beginning to be possible for more of us to get really useful comparative data on local government. For the non-techies among you, this means that – when information is added to a local authority website, the tool that assembles the site adds a bit of code to it that describes what the website is telling you. For example, if you update a table on your website when a new councillor replaces an old one, it is done in such a way as to allow another website to access yours, ask for a list of councillors, and then import that list into their own site.

It can then also pull across information about that councillor’s role in committees, meetings that they are due to attend, contact details, etc.

These data standards enable a quiet quick exchange of information that has a huge amount of potential to increase efficiency and allow us to crunch information and numbers to tell us things that we didn’t know. At the crudest level, we can find out who the councillors are in lots of different councils by looking at one site, but have a look yourself to see what other insights you can gain.

OpenlyLocal is a neat example of what is possible now that data standards are beginning to be applied more consistently.