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Kate Sahota describes how her county council seized the transparency agenda through developing its own open data It seems the key to triggering a successful open data project is to show the people that matter something shiny, like an iPhone, with a real example of what can be achieved with open data. At the end of 2009, Jim Morton, an applications architect, began a small covert operation to start opening up Warwickshire's data under the guise of developing an iPhone application with news, events, jobs and location information from Warwickshire CC. This was launched in January this year and by the middle of May had already been downloaded nearly 2,000 times. Using the success of the iPhone project and the increasing number of good open data examples (such as http://data.gov.uk) we were able to kick-off our own open data project to create http://opendata.warwickshire.gov.uk. As with any project, we needed a solid business case with all the benefits we could muster. The main benefits driving the project were: Transparency for the public Enhancing public communications Improving service delivery and enabling citizens to self-serve Contributing towards new ways of running public services Improving external contribution to WCC Enabling ‘mash-ups' of disparate sources of information to create new ways of looking at information Enabling third sector organisations or individuals to develop applications aggregating data across organisational boundaries Reducing workload in areas like Freedom of Information (FoI), the Observatory and public relations Reinforcing our efforts to resolve data and information issues In January, a small team of four (Jim Morton, myself, Steve Woodward and Terry Rich-Whitehead) began working on getting information out of the organisation and building a technical solution and set of standards that fitted with our ongoing work to introduce open, non-proprietary standards across our ICT architecture. We were keen to ensure the project made use of cloud technologies to deal with any scaling/demand issues. The open data site has been written using Ruby on Rails and is hosted on external platform-as-a-service provider Heroku. The database managing the sets of data includes a standard XML schema for the metadata associated with each dataset. It was very important to ensure this schema was aligned to that used by http://data.gov.uk to enable us to easily extract our metadata for inclusion in their data catalogue. The application has been open-sourced to enable other authorities to easily build their own open data site. The team worked on average two days a week, and by mid-April we had unofficially launched the site with over a dozen datasets. By the time we officially launched a couple of weeks later there were nearly 30. At time of writing, we have more than 60 datasets. It is very important to remember that this project will not directly save money and it will not generate revenue. It will however: Provide an opportunity to ensure data being produced and collated by the authority is of the highest quality Give us more opportunities to identify where we could do things better, and put them right Enable us to re-use data internally so we have our own high quality ‘single source of the truth' Deliver on the transparency agenda and the ‘right to data' Enable us to work more collaboratively with the public Our top tips would be Start off with the easier datasets to get the momentum going, and look at what other people have published Use open source software Run a competition to spark interest in the local community – get some apps developed that prove the case for why open data is a good idea (see our Hack Warwickshire competition) Embed the values of open data wherever possible – the utopian state is that people have to fight for restricting their data, not fight against releasing it Don't take no for an answer – take different approaches for encouraging people to release their data if they are reluctant Show that other people have done it Show the applications that can be built (and have been) Make them aware of the pressure from central government – release data now in a controlled steady fashion, rather than waiting to be pushed The right to data is inevitable. So now we have our iPhone application and our open data site, what now? We are creating an enhanced iPhone application, continually seeking out new datasets and running a quarterly Hack Warwickshire competition. We are actively encouraging other authorities to do the same, as the results of combing a number of datasets for a variety of authorities could prove to be incredibly useful and ensure innovative applications. Kate Sahota is EED & Libraries ICT services team manager at Warwickshire CC

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WHITEHALL

How we opened up our data

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