Firstly, a big thank-you to everyone who commented on the previous posting here on local data sources.  Aside from the comments, I’ve been given loads of really useful pointers via email and Twitter, some of which I’ll acknowledge here, and some will come in subsequent posts.

But here’s an overarching question to start with: If we’re planning to ask school pupils to find data, tidy it up and find new ways to visualise it, it’s obviously useful to ask; Who this is intended to benefit? I think that answering this question can, in itself, tell us a lot about how participation works. It can help us understanding the negotiation that is needed to get the right sort of broadly-based participation that democratic processes need.

We may have reasons that we want people to engage, but we only get access to their cognitive surplus if we can incentivise people (in this case, school pupils) to play along.

In the next few posts, I’ll be signposting useful data. But why would school pupils manipulate and visualise it in the first place?

The obvious beneficiaries could be the pupils themselves. Are we asking them to pull together information that is practically useful to them or that tells them something that benefits them? It could be something that they learn from or that has some utility for them, or something where the collection and preparation of the data is particularly rewarding?

A number of my respondents here and elsewhere have been saying that this is an opportunity to promote coding for kids and / or to get some useful tools built that could have a practical use for somebody. Simon Burall pointed me to the Code Academy site that provides an addictive step-by-step introduction and to Emma Mulqueeny’s work at The Guardian, including links to the new Coding For Kids wiki. Alternatively, there’s the fairly self-explanatory Apps for Good project.

We’re talking about visualisation here, so there are plenty of educational opportunities around maths or design/technology.

Or would we get away with asking for a more selfless contribution? Are we appealing to a civic and democratic sensibility by asking them to “tell us something interesting and useful that we don’t know using information that is freely / easily available”? Essentially, providing unsolicited social research to the local council and other bodies? I suppose they’d learn something about citizenship and sociology from that, but…

Perhaps we’re asking them to do something voluntary? There are 850 active local voluntary sector bodies in the London Borough of Barnet, many of whom don’t have the resources to do research, publicise their work effectively or get their work more effectively on the map – avoiding duplication of effort and maximising take-up or funding opportunities. Could school pupils help their local voluntary sector somehow by crunching data?

Alternatively, we could be asking them to provide information. They could develop an app of some sort, or – more simply – gather information in a spreadsheet (mobile smartphone + Google Docs forms anyone?) One suggestion that came my way was something around personal safety matched to geographical locations. Noel Hatch suggested ideas around behaviour change – even looking at information from their own social networks.

Simon Burall (again!) pointed me to this deciphermydata site from Gallomanor – a really nice project to crowdsource information about flu from schools. The pupils learn a lot around collecting and using data, and scientists learn a lot about instances of flu in schools.

We could be asking pupils to manually gather local geographical data, information about services or local features, information about education provision or….

That paragraph could go on for a long time.  I can think of lots of things that seem good ideas to me, but I’d be really interested to hear the much better ideas that everyone else has.

A while ago, I posted here giving reasons why I thought it would be a good idea to start involving school pupils in the processing of public data.

There are strong democratic arguments for doing this – ones that aren’t immediately obvious. There are also good ‘transparency’ arguments (but I’d make my usual point here about transparency and democracy not always pulling in the same direction).

Local Ward Atlas data - click to explore it

There are two other reasons why this is worth doing:

1. It’ll be fun to do. School pupils, doing all kinds of things with data that their older neighbours wouldn’t value just for the hell of it. Anyone watching this will learn a lot and probably have a laugh while doing it
2. It will be a good thought experiment for everyone involved. In my experience, most people who work in or with local authorities don’t really understand the potential to do good things here.

I’ve never seen anyone try to pull together a good index of all of the relevant and interesting data that is available within one local authority area with the aim of giving school pupils something to work with, so over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing exactly that.

In this case, I’ll be looking at what data we can find on the area covered by the London Borough of Barnet (I live there, and the council have expressed an interest in this anyway) from a variety of different sources.

I’ll be writing a short article here on each of them outlining what they have and how it could be used, and hopefully sharing a few of them on the London Data Store blog. I should add here that a lot of what follows has resulted from conversations with friends, too numerous to credit here, but I was give a good initial steer by Emer Coleman at the London Data Store who has a strong local authority background.

I’d really welcome your feedback on any of this.

So, my first question; Are there any obvious omissions from this list of sources (below) that I’m going to go to for data that we can use with school pupils at a data-hack event?

• The council themselves – for demographics, expenditure, service provision and take-up, revenue and other relevant data. There is currently a Maps Facts & Figures page on their site, but I think that there could be more ‘machine readable’ data that we could get from them with a bit of help
• The data behind the police crime-mapping services
• The London Data store - loads of information from a wide variety of different subject areas
• The local Primary Care Trust /NHS
• The local voluntary service council

There’s one further area that has been suggested to me. School pupils are likely to be very interested in Children’s issues anyway, and every local authority commissions some research that doesn’t fit into national frameworks. So I’m going to be having a conversation with the Children’s Services office if I get the chance. In addition, any information I can get on schools will be particularly useful for the same reasons.

If my own children are anything to go by, I suspect that they will want to move quickly beyond the data that we provide them with and start creating their own information. There’s a huge wealth of information that children could provide about their local area – data that could be crowd-sourced with a bit of creative thinking.

We will need to ask them – or even encourage them to do the asking. This is, of course, the holy grail of democratic data-use – participation and co-design. But for now, I’d like to explore the limits of the data that adults have provided. At the moment, many adults don’t really understand that a huge variety of data-types + analysis can be very valuable.

We can walk now. Running comes later.

Toby Blume – my co-host of the session on data visualisation at Local Gov Camp (last Saturday in Birmingham) – has posted his observations from the session here. In addition, Nick Booth has been busy with two posts on the subject.

A few standout quotes: Firstly, here’s Nick:

“…there’s a false expectation that visualising data is easy. The JFDI attitude prevalent in other areas of digital tools for local government may have created false expectations on ease of access to visualisation.

Other digital tools in the social web made for publishing content – such as free blog platforms, Twitter, Facebook Pages or sharing video on YouTube – are relatively straightforward to get started with and local authorities are using these tools to great effect already.

But ease of access to tools, having the ability to publish or the skills to find your way around a blog platform doesn’t necessarily mean you can communicate effectively. Also, you can’t learn to write well or communicate with other people by spending an afternoon reading blog posts on the subject. These are skills that take time to build up and are achieved through practice, experimentation and, frankly, well… work or experience.

Making an effective data visualisation of a civic issue or communicating policy ideas visually to help other people understand the issues is an involved process…”

And Toby brings something else to the table here that slightly jars with Nick’s line:

“Data visualisation is very different to policy visualisation – using data presents all sorts of particular issues and challenges, relating to how you collect and manage data, design and communication skills, corporate culture and practice and purpose.

Policy visualisation – that is, presenting policy in a more visual and accessible way – is, I think, simpler to do. It’s about communicating potentially complex information in a friendlier and more inclusive way. It is helpful to bring good quality design skills to the process, but it’s not essential (at least my experience suggests this is the case – given the positive feedback I’ve had, despite being a design novice).

As important as the end product (ie the visualisation) is the deliberative process of exploring the issues and ideas, reflecting different perspectives and ultimately increasing understanding of the issue [my emphasis]. This is consistent with the learning from Visualcamp – that bringing together designers, policy makers and practitioners (or ‘users’) and arming them simply with pieces of paper and pens, the process of developing a visualisation led to a rich and open discussion about the policy in question.”

If there’s an argument here (and to be fair, there probably isn’t), I’m with Toby. This is not about corporate communications – it’s about the process as much as the outcome. It’s also about the small-p politics of the thing, as I outlined in this post on my work-blog the other day. This is something that councils should be wanting more of.

Sure – there’s a place for a really professional description of the problem as a conversation starter – my friends at ThinkPublic do this beautifully.

But it’s not a professional-doing-it-properly vs social-media-bootstrapping opposition here.

It’s the thing that we often forget about what the blogosphere has brought to public life. We focus – understandably – on the noisy activist bloggers who’ve done big game-changing things (Guido / Taxpayers Alliance = anti-politics, Liberal Conspiracy = new convened voice for the left, MyDavidCameron & 38 Degrees = social-media-as-campaign-vehicle, etc). The sociology of the Westminster Village may be different (even worse?) as a result.

But there’s another dimension. The blogosphere – in it’s widest incarnation – is also a low level conversation. It’s another dimension to the conversational politics question that I posted on earlier today. A talking cure in which issues are discussed and (I beleive, but can’t prove) participants rationalise and learn. Bloggers make new contacts and synthesise new ideas more quickly. And (my personal motto), ‘I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.’ (OK, disclosure: that’s Flannery O’Connor’s line).

Getting school pupils to think about what information is available and how it helps them to describe what government is brings us into the realms of co-creation and co-design. We learn thing we didn’t know – and we’re asking people to describe the problem rather than getting unelected people to tell us what the solutions should be.

It’s playful. It’s educational (for all concerned). It’s also less problematic from a democratic point of view.

I’ll conclude here by re-posting the conclusions people drew from the session (they were buried at the back of the slideshow last time) – I think they’re a good roundup.

• Review required skills for LocalGov employment
• Co-ordinate visualisation skills within local government better
• Lower expectations on corporate style – go for authenticity rather than branding
• Encourage people other than formal employees to present information – it’s more authentic – enable and curate rather than ‘just create’
• Make a clearer link between participation and decision making
• Make organisations more permissive in comms terns – making everything go through the corporate filter doesn’t work
• When we inform – say WHY we’re informing
• Curate walk-throughs of how people do good data visualisation – dotgovlabls/skunkworks
• Visual media surgeries!

I spent Saturday at Local Government Camp in Birmingham – there’ll be at least one post along here shortly based on things I learned there. But this one is here to host the slides I used at the start of the conversation (sorry – Slideshare is being a complete pain today and I can’t embed the slides for some reason):

Along with @tobyblume, I initiated one that was intended to be on data visualisation and how schools could be more effective partners in this. It was based on the idea posted here the other day.

We kicked off the session identifying what visualisation is intended to achieve – at least in democratic terms (the slides – above – are based on this post that I wrote for my business blog) – and in the end we didn’t get much beyond this issue and it’s implications for local government’s corporate culture, but I think that the observations that came out of it were very useful indeed.

The conclusions the group reached can be seen on the final slide. I’d be interested to know if you think that there are any obvious lessons that we missed?

I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else.

Crowdsourced data visualisations are more useful for the public sector

Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy journalists and political parties have in describing the problems that elected representatives are expected to solve.

The rubbish-in-rubbish-out problem. They are, therefore an opportunity to involve more of us in a constructive way in policy making.

According to Public Technology, this is a bigger opportunity than I realised because public sector managers use data visualisations more than the private sector do.

Secondly, Alison Benjamin has a good roundup of the problems that a reliance upon social entrepreneurs and active citizens can bring in the provision of local services.

“…if you live in a neighbourhood where concerned, educated, articulate residents with time on their hands will rise to the challenge. Leaving the fate of, say, the local library in their hands may not be such a bad idea. But what about areas where decades of joblessness and drugs and benefit dependency may have robbed residents of any glimmer of a can-do culture? Here, doesn’t the state have a moral duty to provide a library service where pensioners can read the paper, where schoolchildren can do their homework in peace and discover a world of books not available at home, and where the digitally excluded are able to participate in the wonders of the internet?

If library provision were left to local volunteers, or social enterprises – those not-for-profit organisations run by entrepreneurs much-feted by the cheerleaders of this new settlement – what of the postcode lottery that would no doubt result?”

She’s very restrained. If I’d have been there and got the glib ‘so what’ response that she received, I would have left the room only to return shortly with a flamethrower.

Thirdly, there’s Dave Briggs post on Google Buzz – the reviews I’ve seen are mixed. One side of the argument from Google Reader addicts who carefully select who sends them recommendations is that all of a sudden a tool that was working beautifully is suddenly chucking loads of unrequested information at me.

The other side of the argument is that it will being an awful lot more people into the day-to-day activity of sharing and collaborative authoring of content. This can only be a good thing for everyone, surely?

I was out-and-about the other day and came across this advert:

My local authority want me to have my say in how they spend and collect their money. When I got home, I visited the www.barnet.gov.uk/budget site accordingly.

It was quite good. It  went some way towards explaining how the council is funded and what it spends its money on. There are some big headline graphs that show “Barnet Council’s back office costs are amongst the lowest in London” and “Barnet receives substantially less financial support from central Government than the London average.”

It also has a budget simulator using Delib‘s platform. For some reason, it only offers us the option to see the impact of budget reductions in specific policy areas (I’d like to see options to increase some of the spends). For the sake of completeness, there’s a detailed document that shows the figures tabulated, and if anyone had the time and energy, they could go through the figures and raise questions about particular elements.

But Barnet deserve credit for having also taken the figures and poured them into a good info-graphic (by the way, I’m including these images just in case they are taken down when the consultation ends).

All-in-all though – leaving the graphic aside, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole thing was being framed to suit a desired outcome. I’m sure that there are comparison charts where Barnet’s performance is closer to the mediocre than the outstanding.

Now Barnet are something of a controversial local authority. They fell out with Ken Livingstone when they removed a lot of traffic calming measures a few years ago. As the Association of British Drivers put it, “Barnet is on the front line against Ken Livingstone and TfL’s anti-car policies by adopting common sense policies on transport.” They also have a hawkish approach to social care and the EasyCouncil model are not without its critics.

I’m not here to go over these issues, but it’s worth looking at some of the more bog-standard questions that I think a lot of councils would benefit from answering. My biggest problem with the way Barnet are doing this (and I should be clear, I’m picking on Barnet because I live there – you could do a similar exercise with any council, and you may find that Barnet have gone further than most in even bothering to ask) is that there seems to be a political and managerial monopoly on the framing of the consultation.

Surely the opposition groups could have been provided with comparable resources to describe the situation differently and frame the options to suit their agendas?

Or even better, they could have adopted the following workflow:

1. Follow The Conservative Party’s lead in using Google Moderator to crowdsource a set of questions from the public. Get dozens of people to ask questions (invite texts and tweets – they don’t need to all be from local residents!) and try to drive thousands of people to bid those questions up or down. Texts are crucial here – any local lists that can be used, and any way of incentivising people to do so – perhaps even a small prize for the selected questions?
2. Then commit to getting an independent body (not selected by the council) to answer those questions on the council’s behalf. Invite all councillors to provide their own commentaries on the answers if they wish.
3. Provide the raw data and offer a cash prize (say £3k?) to anyone who can take that data and use it to help visualise what the key decisions are most effectively. Invite a group of local residents to award that prize to the people who help improve their understanding and clarify the issues the best
4. Only then, present your options to the public – and get indicative results by reaching out over the heads of the hard-to-avoids to the hard-to-reach local residents – I have a suggestion of how this could be done here.

None of this is likely to prove too attractive to councils for two reasons.

Firstly, it takes a lot of power out of the hands of unelected officials – the monopoly on describing problems was always a key weapon in Sir Humphrey’s armoury. Secondly, Barnet’s Tories would only have been human if they’d framed the questions that they wanted answered. Most ruling local groups will do this. But they did so, and it’s a bit naughty, isn’t it?

However, I’d suggest that councils may be pleasantly surprised if they did it my way. The biggest thing missing from Barnet’s current consultation model is that there is very little space for the public to tell everyone something that they didn’t already know about Barnet’s policy options.

I’ve been working with Mick Fealty over at the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole on a bit of an experiment. We decided to try and convene some free consultancy for all of the political parties in Northern Ireland – starting with the ruling (!) bloc, the DUP.

As with all political weblogs that host antagonistic debates, there is no shortage of name-calling and point-scoring. But if you ask the readers to look at things from a strategic point of view, you may find out something that you didn’t know in the first place.

Mick is no mean political analyst himself, and nor are his regular contributors. But by inviting commenters to look at thing objectively – to spell out what they see as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that the DUP face, commenters from all sides of the spectrum could at least agree on where the DUP stand on the political chessboard.

It provides a useful tool in any materialist analysis of ‘what will happen next’ because, for all that some politics is, as Harold Wilson put it, “a crusade or it is nothing”, the last few weeks in Northern Ireland have shown that political parties rarely do anything unless it allows them to make the best of whatever strategic hole they are in.

So, having attracted lots of comments over the course of one day, deleted the ones that sought to introduce pointless whataboutery and pointscoring, Mick was left with a couple of dozen nuggets of information.

Next step? Let’s visualise them – put them in a fun-to-fiddle-with application like Prezi: (be patient – it takes a while to load…..)

No time to post much here today apart from to point to the new UK government data website – www.data.gov.uk – as described here. There are plenty of data sets that allow you to browse geographical data and find out different information about local schools and other services.

There’s also a good section in which Sir Tim Berners-Lee explains what the semantic web is in fairly straightforward terms.

View it here, by all means, but do visit the site as well if you can?

For me, the most exciting bit is that it allows people to see things in new ways and conceptualise problems differently. Poor policy-making costs us a fortune and results in missed opportunities. I’m not sure that Brian Hoadley fully gets this when he says:

“I’ve been waiting for Joe Bloggs on the street to mention in passing – “Hey, just yesterday I did ‘x’ online” and have it be one of those new ‘Services’ that has been developed from the release of our data. (Note: A Joe Bloggs who is not related to Government or those who encircle Government. A real true independent Citizen.)

It may be a long wait.”

Meantimes, here’s Stuart on Lichfield’s data and what it adds to the knowledge of local authorities about their own area, as well as our knowledge about our local authorities.

As I’ve spent a lot of time recently banging on about visual representations of policy issues, this post on the GOOD website is something of a feast.

Further to my previous post on why visualisation of data matters – and what the potential abuses are in the hands of pressure groups.

I’ve just seen this video by an American pollster and data visualiser @alexlundry – he covers the deceptive use of visualisations and the way that lobbies use them.

He covers the reasons why this is a much more powerful way of presenting information.

He also covers …. oh, just watch the whole thing. It’s only a coupla minutes and it’s very good.

(via Tom, Tom and Russell).

I draw one hefty conclusion from it. We need to find a way to increase public awareness of how this data can be abused, manipulated and misrepresented using the devices that Alex has outlined here. This is an important bit of civil literacy that could counteract many of the threats that I outlined in my previous post here.

Perhaps a Tumblr-type website where any mashups that anyone sees are submitted, then people who know about it (or are prepared to read a few of the books in this presentation) give the mashup points based upon the provenance and honesty of the data and it’s use?