Category Archives: local government

Sharing images openly is better than uploading to single sites

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Simon Whitehouse, blogging as part of his day-job with Digital Birmingham, suggests that to the History Pin website.

That’s a neat idea; it would be a collaborative move on behalf of the City (disclosure: they employ me, but these are my own thoughts), and would be of interest to the general public.

However, the time and effort spent doing do so would only be of use to that one site and its visitors.

A better solution, perhaps, would be for the City Council (and anyone making archives of images available in an open manner) to invest the equivalent effort in adding metadata (about the subject, location, date and licence, which should of course be open) to suitable images, and for third-party sites to then parse that metadata, and import the images. Of course, such an import could also be done by individuals, on an “as needed” (or more likely “as desired”) basis, as a crowd-sourcing activity.

Carved and painted stone coat of arms

My picture of the City of Birmingham's pre-1974 coat of arms, hosted on Flickr, where it has lots of lovely, rich metadata and an open licence

The question is — what is the best way to include such metadata — internal to the image, in a format like ? As scrapeabe text, on a page displaying the image, like Flickr’s metadata, such as tags? Or on such a page, but using a parsable , or as a separate resource, such as ? Or a combination of these?

And are any third-party sites already indexing or aggregating images and their metadata in this way? If not, why not? Do we have a chicken-and-egg problem?

Everything at your postcode – proposal for a new website

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Over the last few weeks, I have been imagining a website for UK citizens and visitors; where they can enter their postcode and be served a page or pages of hyperlocal links about everything to do with where they live. This post is me continuing that thinking out loud; comments — including the constructively critical — are actively solicited.

Links could be almost anything, from local government services (via DirectGov and OpenlyLocal) to public transport information; from maps to fun things. They would either link to sites which use postcodes as as an argument; or would be built using the target site’s postcode-lookup API.

The site would avoid the need for each hyperlocal website to compile its own list of such links.

Here are a few such links, based on a randomly-selected postcode, B23 6UH (I simply opened a local newspaper and picked the first advert that used a Birmingham postcode). Note that the first link is computed; the rest use the postcode directly.

User would also be able to suggest additional links if they find a good web service which takes a postcode as a locator — for now, please feel free to do so in comments on this post, and I’ll add them to the above list. Purely commercial links, like individual chains’ store locators, would be excluded (a few paid for links, clearly identified as such, might generate enough revenue to cover hosting costs).

As can be seen from the above, the site wouldn’t actually store or generate content; just links. The links could be clustered under headings, or on sub-pages, like “maps”, “local services”, and “fun stuff”.

It might also be possible for the site to determine the user’s nearest postcode, using their browser or device’s GeoLocation feature, or by selection from a map. The site would also accept partial postcodes, such as “B”, “B23” or “B23 6”.

The service could perhaps be “widgetised” for inclusion on other sites. And of course, it would be possible to link to the site using postcode as an argument.

The site would, of course, make data available in RSS, OPML and open data formats; and use microformats.

Unfortunately, though be willing to collate and maintain the links and code some HTML, I lack the programming and graphic-design skills to make such a site, which means that I must rely on the good will of others. Can you help? Should I organise a hack event (a day, or an evening) at a Birmingham venue, to work on this collaboratively?

Or does such a service — curated, rather than spammy — already exist? Would it belong better as an adjunct to an existing service like OpenlyLocal or DirectGov?

Over to you…

Open local public spending data – a potential hitch

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There is — quite rightly, in my autocratic and what-does-humble-mean-anyway opinion — a move to have public bodies publish details of every item of spending over £500. I won’t go into the arguments about this, nor the technical issues, because that’s already been done by wiser heads than mine, Oh, OK, wise heads including mine (see comments on the latter document).

However, one thing in particular concerns me. Sometimes, a body — a local council, say, like, but not specifically, the one I work for — will receive grant funding for a project or activity. Such money usually comes with conditions attached.

Now, suppose this funding has two parts: £99,000 to do something which benefits the community as a whole, and £1,000 which must be spent on something seemingly trivial; say, publicising the activity by producing beermats. No beermats; no £99,000 to spend on a worthwhile activity. Such things do happen, if not literally demanding beermats.

Suppose that £1,000 spend is then published, along with hundreds of other items of expenditure. The finance office of the council will not know about the grant funding, or the conditions attached to it, nor do they need to. They will just add an entry to a database, saying “Acme Beer Mats, 1 April 2011: £1,000”, which will then be made available with all the other enteries in that database, as open data

Along come the Daily FMail and the Taxpayer’s Alliance, and before you know it, the media and (ironically, given my frivolous example) bar-rooms up and down the country are full of “Borsetshire Council wastes money on beermats extravaganza on the rates[sic]” headlines.

No doubt the authority will put out a subsequent press statement pointing out the £99,000 of benefits, the unavoidability of the attached conditions, and so on. And no doubt it will receive little if any press attention.

What can council’s do to prevent this scenario? Annotate every spend item in their published data? Surely impractical. List such items separately? I don’t know (and don’t get me wrong, I’m an open-data advocate; and this is a relatively minor matter, which shouldn’t stop such data from being published), but do I hope somebody has an answer.

Over to you…

Footnote: thanks to for encouraging me to blog my rambling comments on this, made during our earlier discussion.

My Open Data Challenge to UK Local Government: a Wikipedia Page for Every Council

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At yesterday’s excellent West Midlands “Open Data: Challenges & Opportunities” event, hosted by the West Midlands Regional Observatory, Chris Taggart (), who runs the very useful Openly Local website, aggregating data about councils and their elected members, mentioned the problems he has extracting linked data about councils from Wikipedia, via DBPedia, because Wikipedia tends to conflate places with their local authorities.

See, for example, the Wikipedia article on the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley; or those on , which (at the time of writing) has only a small section on its town council and Lichfield district (so a challenge there for Stuart Harrison, , and his colleagues!); and compare them with the separate articles about and ; or , the , and . The former, all-on-one-page, pattern is far more common. (Disclosure: I created some, and have edited all, of those articles.)

I suggested at the event that this problem could be solved if staff from each UK council simply started a Wikipedia article about their council, where none already exists.

As each UK council is, inherently, (to use the Wikipedia jargon) notable, there should be no issue with this, provided that they are mindful of Wikipedia’s policy on conflicts of interest (which explicitly allows for such editing), and the requirement that articles maintain a neutral point-of-view, and be referenced. Short “stub” articles can be created in the first instance.

(If council staff are hesitant to do so themselves, then I can help to pair them up with volunteer Wikipedia editors who will assist them, or create articles directly.)

Update: Added Dudley & Lichfield district examples.