Come to CityCamp 2!

CityCamp Brighton 2 will bring together local government, businesses, community organisations and academia to make stuff happen – discussing and using great ideas, cross-sector collaboration and new technologies to make a positive difference in our city.

It’s free. It’s open to all (though you do need to get a ticket first).

Last year it was “the most inspiring event I attended”, according to one participant. “It changed my whole outlook”, according to another. This year it’s even better.

 
Register for CityCamp Brighton 2 on Eventbrite
 

Projects Update: MyUrbanAngel

Sue George reports on the progress made with MyUrbanAngel since CityCamp last year. First in a series of posts on projects from last year’s camp and where they’ve got to.

So, finally, finally, after what has been months but seemed like years, the MUA team have found a developer to work with us to develop a prototype for our app. Following CityCamp last March, we narrowed down who we are targeting the app at, learnt a lot more about what features they would like and how they would use it, and adapted our ideas as a result. We’ve also been working on our visual identity, got the barebones of a business plan in place and, most importantly, found out all the flaws in our initial idea.

We got to a stage where we were ready to start developing in the Summer but had very little interest in any of the adverts we put out. Maybe it was the timing, maybe we failed to tap into the right networks, maybe people are trying to tell us something. But could we find someone willing and able to do this work? We could not. So, without the technical skills to do this ourselves, we were, effectively, stuffed (technical term) and the project pretty much stalled.

Development of a prototype is now underway, however, and we’re all excited about having a chance to talk about it with all the clever, practical and experienced people at CityCamp in March. Hopefully you’ll be able to give us some feedback and help us overcome some of the technical and other challenges we have encountered so we can move the project onto its next stage.

CityCamp tickets now available!

It’s time to get hold of your tickets for CityCamp. More than thirty (of the 200 available) are already gone, so don’t delay. We’re going to be at the Sallis Benney Theatre on Grand Parade on the Friday, and are hoping to be at the Amex Stadium conference rooms on Saturday and Sunday – we’re waiting on final confirmation.

A few things to know before you put your order in:

  • There are separate tickets for Friday and the weekend, like last year – if you want to come to the whole event you need two tickets
  • Weekend tickets are divided by sector so we can see what sort of balance we have on the day. If you aren’t sure which sector you belong to, or if you belong to more than one, just choose the closest fit.
  • There is an option to give a small (or large) donation to our running costs – anything you can spare would be gratefully received but it’s definitely not compulsory.
  • If the ticket type you want is sold out, you can add yourself to the wait list, and any tickets that come up will be released to you (in the order than you joined the wait list)

Now, go get ‘em!

How to get help from CityCamp Brighton

Thanks to everyone who came to our CityCamp Induction event last night, we had a great turnout, and more than thirty CityCamp tickets are already booked, which is fantastic. If you didn’t come, you can get your chance to book from 9 o’clock this morning.

We also announced some details of how you can find funding for your idea from the CityCamp prize fund – even if you aren’t able to be there on the day. Here are the details (via Scribd):

Get Help From City Camp

CityCamp 2 – it’s ON!

It’s time for CityCamp Brighton 2. Following on from the success of last year’s event, which saw almost 200 people come together for a weekend of learning, discussing, imagining and building, we’re doing it all over again – but even better.

CityCamp Brighton is about thinking differently about the way our city works and about using the web, technology and participation to change the future of our city.  You can come for the whole event, or for part of it – and you should, because.

  • You can have great ideas
  • You can meet the council and public service staff who can help turn your idea into reality
  • You can win money to make things happen
  • It’s free
  • It’s fun and inspiring
  • It is full of interesting people who all share a passion for Brighton & Hove

It doesn’t matter whether you’re someone with an idea or a problem to solve, or if you have skills you can bring. CityCamp is for people who are passionate about our city and want to find new ways of doing things.

This year we are making things even better than in 2011:

  • We have a bigger prize fund – over £20,000 compared to last year’s £10,000
  • We are going to give out a range of smaller grants alongside a big prize on the day, so there’s a better chance of getting some funding for your great idea
  • We are holding a free evening “CityCamp induction” for community groups and others who want to take part, but don’t know what to expect.

So join us! City Camp Brighton 2.0 will be from 2-4th March 2012, and our special induction evening on 9 February. Tickets for the main event will be released on 10 February – those at the induction evening will get the chance to book on the spot.

RSA/CityCamp Ideas Garage: Wednesday

Just a quick note to those who didn’t see it on the mailing list – the RSA and CityCamp Brighton are partnering for a quick evening of social innovation, with prizes, at the Skiff tomorrow (Wednesday) from 7. Some tickets still left – book yours here.

Three picks from the Open Data sweet-shop Part 2

The Head of IT at Brighton & Hove Council recently weighed-in with a big offer to the Open Data Brighton & Hove group – “tell us what data you need, and we’ll open it up”. Having worked with government data one way or another for about 20 years, that sounds like opening up the sweet shop and inviting us to help ourselves. In other words, count me in.

In the first of a multi-parter on the Open Data Sweet Shop, I looked at data for school admissions to help parents make choices – http://www.ocsi.co.uk/news/2011/09/01/three-picks-from-the-open-data-sweet-shop-%E2%80%93-part-1/. In this second post, I cover ‘how good are services’.

Open Data Pick 2. How good are services?

From a non-random and non-scientific sample of friends who don’t work in public services, most people take government talk about transparency and open data to mean spending data. The Guardian’s lovely data visualisation of public spending in the UK has ended up on people’s walls, and it’s difficult to avoid the constant media snippets on how councils or other public sector organisations are allegedly pouring money down the drain on things like days out at the races (somehow the actual facts of using Newmarket’s reasonable conference facilities on non-race days didn’t seem to get as much press).

But I don’t just want to feel the quantity, I want to feel the quality too. Simply knowing how much something costs doesn’t help us decide how good that thing is.  And simply publishing how much something costs is just fuel for media articles about how much is being wasted – articles that don’t want to go into all that boring detail about whether it was money well spent or not.

If the public sector is real about using open data to improve quality of services, then it needs to be publishing how good services are. A “scores on the doors” rating for services.  Useful to local voters, users of services, media and indeed councillors/ MPs and officers in local and national organisations. Next time I’m voting, or talking to my councillor, or hearing someone moan about the bleedin’ council and how much money they are wasting, this is the sort of information I’d want at my fingertips.

Surely there’s something out there already, I hear you cry. Well, kind of. The Audit Commission, set up by Michael Heseltine in the 80s “to protect the public purse“, carried out evaluations of local authorities and services including a “Use of Resources” element (how effectively was money spent). The previous government also set out a series of National Indicators (and earlier Best Value Performance Indicators – love the jargon) by which local services and agencies were assessed. (And of course, there is already information on quality for some services such as schools, where pupil exam results and value-added measures are routinely published. But this isn’t the case for most local services.)

But both the Audit Commission and National Indicators are on their way out. Although many won’t mourn their passing, it does leave a gap in knowing how good local services are – and how they compare with services in other areas. And that makes it harder for us (and councillors and senior managers and local media and …) to understand where our council is doing really well, and where it could do better. And that’s a bad thing.

So here’s the suggestion. Local councils and other agencies to open-up the information which they use to decide how good services are. Whether services are run internally or commissioned externally, there should be measures of performance.  These measures tell us both the yardstick by which local services are judged by the council, and how well they are doing against that yardstick.

Publishing this information would be a powerful way of moving the debate on from simply “how much”, to “how good”. And understanding the yardstick by which services are currently evaluated is an important step in widening the debate on how to improve services – and even perhaps involving us all in agreeing the yardstick to judge services.

These sound like topics for next month’s Brighton CityForum. Come along and get involved.

Tom Smith, OCSI.

Three picks from the Open Data sweet-shop – Part 1

(This post originally appeared at http://www.ocsi.co.uk/news/2011/09/01/three-picks-from-the-open-data-sweet-shop-%E2%80%93-part-1/).

The Head of IT at Brighton & Hove Council, Paul Colbran, recently weighed-in with a big offer to the Open Data Brighton & Hove group – “tell us what data you need, and we’ll open it up”. Having worked with government data one way or another for about 20 years, that sounds like opening up the sweet shop and inviting us to help ourselves. In other words, count me in.

I’ve tried hard and managed to restrict myself to only 3 picks from the sweet counter. I’ve also avoided the easy answer “open up everything and let us decide”, and gone for things that (I hope) are reasonably plausible. And finally, I’ve gone for things that I think will make a difference. Data that we can use across the city to change things, not just sit in a data store gathering digital dust.

In this first of a 2-part blog, I’m looking at data for school admissions to help parents make choices.  A follow-up part will look at information on value-for-money, and understanding detailed patterns of deprivation across the city. I hope that some of these could be useful starters-for-10 for the October CityForum meeting in Brighton.

Open Data Pick 1. School choices – helping parents

It’s exam results season again, with the usual excitement and scramble for university places. As a parent of a 3 year-old, that all seems a long way off. By contrast, the application for school places is frighteningly real. From today (1st September) onwards, the parents of 6,000 children across the city will be wading through documents galore as they try to work out what schools they have any chance of getting into, and how those schools compare on Ofsted inspections and exam results.

So why do I think open data could help? Because currently the system is a maze. Without going into the gory details, getting hold of the available information involves phone-calls with the (very helpful) council school admissions team, reading many PDF documents, copying and pasting between Excel spreadsheets, following-up on rumours from friends that “such-and-such information” might be available, estimating probabilities over time, and numerous Google searches.

For a researcher this is bread & butter stuff (although I still have an uneasy feeling I’ve missed something critical) but not all parents will be so used to working with spreadsheets. As one possible future scenario is that open data could actually increase exclusion for those groups with less time or knowhow to find out what they need (Michael Gurstein has a couple of good posts on the ‘data divide’ here and here), it’s important we make sure that published data can easily be digested by all groups.

The information needed by parents includes the following list, which is all currently available to parents but from multiple sources.

  1. Home-school distance for all schools: For admission to primary schools, the walking distance (not straightline distance) from your home to each school is the critical piece of data in Brighton & Hove. Currently you either ring up the Council school admissions, or fill in this web-form. As the admissions team presumably has a bit of GIS kit that gives them the answers (rather than working it all out from maps and bits of string), this would need to be opened up via some kind of API, or perhaps pre-calculated for all postcodes and schools in Brighton. [Note, the School Map website has location of all schools across England, with estimated straight-line distance from your postcode -  but Brighton uses walking distance not straight-line.]
  2. School application information, including location, application forms, open day dates (or visitor details) etc. This is currently held on school websites and PDF documents.
  3. Previous year applications and acceptances data, including number of places; number of applications (and whether the school was 1st, 2nd or 3rd choice); number of places granted; number of applications by status (basically whether they got a place through having brother/ sister at the school, religious status in case of the religious schools,  being close to the school, or other reason).  Currently this is spread across PDF documents, with data for religious schools confusingly in a different location.
  4. Home-school distance for previous successful applicants: This is the key bit that tells you whether your child would likely get in to a particular school (assuming they don’t have siblings at the school or other special status). Having this data available by year would allow the website to identify whether an application from your address would have likely got in on each of the previous years.
  5. School exam results over time: Including any value-added (progress) scores, and breakdowns by free-school meals or other standard indicators. (currently available on the Department for Education website as a postcode-based search).
  6. Ofsted school inspections reports: Currently available on the Ofsted website from a postcode-based search for Ofsted reports – http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/inspection-reports/find-inspection-report.

So what could make this information easier to navigate? Basically I want a single place to go to get all this information, where the information is well explained and easy-to-use. And critically I want to be able to input my address (or postcode) and have the website show me the appropriate schools – and whether or not I would have been successful in previous years.

If each of these datasets were published and referenced by school code, they could be linked-up relatively straightforwardly, put on a nice interactive map front-end, and updated annually from easily published info.

There are commercial organisations out there that aim to do this sort of thing for local authorities, but they’re fairly expensive and have fairly low take-up (I’ve only come across a handful of LAs using these). There are also some free services to parents such as the Hertfordshire School Guru. I’d take a punt that something similar in Brighton could work very well.

Tom Smith, OCSI.

CityCamp meet up July

A group of enthusiastic CityCampers and a few new faces met last night to catch up on the CityCamp projects, new ideas, and what’s coming up in the autumn.

We started rotating the ‘chair’ of the session so it can always be ‘by the group, for the group’, many thanks to Rob Shepherd for taking the reigns and encouraging a great, wide-ranging discussion. Read on for a quick summary of all the amazing links and ideas and energy that exploded in the room! Or you can catch up on the tweets from the night.

Jo Ivens gave the latest from Demsoc Brighton on the exciting events coming up in autumn:

CityForum (also known as CityCamp 1.5) is an event Demsoc Brighton is running in conjunction with Brighton University where a diverse range of people will come together to discuss issue facing our City, and come up with practical solutions together. It will take place over the afternoon and evening of Wednesday 5 October and culminate in a pitching session where groups will present their ideas and solutions to a panel of local leaders, people who are in a position to commit to taking the best ideas forward. Already confirmed are Council boss John Barradell and Community & Voluntary Sector Forum Director, Gordon McCullough and we hope to also have  Colin Monk, of Brighton University. Any other suggestions? Let us know via brighton@demsoc.org

The event itself will take place on at the Sallis Benney Theatre at Brighton University on Grand Parade, and there will be a month long online discussion as part of the Brighton Digital Festival . Everyone is invited to be involved with the event and with the online discussions – and this is being launched on 6 September at The Hampton pub in Hove.

As usual with the meet up advice and links were suggested: Brightone – the digital volunteering group might help with developing the platform for online discussions, and all CityCampers were asked to contribute, retweet, use their networks to link and engage people, any volunteers for moderating or encouraging debate are very welcome (thank you Benita Matofska for being the first volunteer!)

Demsoc are partnering with the RSA South East network of social innovators to put on another event during the Digital Festival – a Social Innovation Ideas Evening - a kind of dragons den for social good.  This will be at The Skiff on 21 September in the evening and will also have an online component in advance. So people with killer ideas who want to pitch to the RSA Dragons for support and possible finance can build momentum and steal a march on the competition by workshopping their ideas on line!

Updated from CityCamp projects

iNoticeboard – Cat Fletcher described her recent experience of trying to get hold of data on bus stops in Brighton & Hove, including finally going through the Freedom Of Information route to find out number, location and ownership of bus stops…hard work indeed.  Resources and advice suggested by the group were to talk to fellow CityCampers OCSI and Tobias Quinn, Emer Coleman at London Data Store, Andy Stanford Clarke, IBM’s Master Inventor (surely a contender for Best Job Title in the World) and looking at what data the Department for Transport have released on this.

It brought up a useful point – once you have all this data…how do you use, interpret, understand it?  For the non-statistician, it’s a very daunting task.

Tom Smith talked about the DataBridge project – which is working with six VCS organisations to look at how they use their own data, existing public data and identifying open data to be released. OCSI are working with data from groups to look at service provision mapping, identification of gaps and visualising this. Jo Ivens is writing a report of the findings including recommendations for the voluntary sector and for the partnership. There was lots of discussion about how the City uses data from non-public service providers, how this could be improved and links suggested to It’s Time To Neighbourhood Plan powered by Nexters and Patchwork, an app being developed by FutureGov in Litchfield focusing on safeguarding vulnerable children.

Sue Korman sent a update – Learn Local First is now connected to Digital Education Brighton and will showcase curriculum links for creative technology in the classroom as well as factual local content. The website is underdevelopment at SCIP, thanks to Mark, Sue will Tweet when we launch. Thanks to City Camp, Laura & Andrew at Public-i for continued support. Please follow on Twitter at @learnlocalfirst

The winners of the £10,000 prize at CityCamp, My Urban Angel also sent an update. They’re setting up as a social enterprise, running focus groups, thinking about what they need from the design of the app and hope to have something to show at CityForum in October. Follow @myurbanangel and congrats from all the CityCamp folks to Pete who’s getting married this weekend!

Finally, Tom from OCSI presented their great new app, Numberhood for iPhone or iPad. Local statistics in your pocket!  The app gives you instant access to data for the important local issues in your area, visualises and describes more than 80 indicators across 10 themes, and compares trends and current position against regional and national data.

Brains a-fizzing and connections forming all over the place – thanks for a great session and to newbies Benita Matofska from People Who Share, James Togut from Sunshine Bank and Martin Digon who came along for the first time, you were very welcome!

CityCamp meetup, CityCamp 1.5 and more

Three great things to look forward to – next week, in the autumn, and next year.

1. CityCamp Meetup – 16 June

The next CityCamp meetup will be on Thursday 16th June at the Hove Kitchen on Western Road, Hove. It’s a more accessible venue than the Earth and Stars, but just as friendly. We’ll be meeting from 7.30, and hearing the latest updates from CityCamp projects, news from the Council elections and their aftermath, as well as more details on our plans for future events.

We’re also really pleased to announce a regular date for future meetups, which you can put in your diary right away – future CityCamp meetups will be on the third Thursday of every month except August.

We’re also talking to organisations around the city about joining us to support the CityCamp network with funding and practical support, and we hope to have a brilliant partner to announce at the meetup – we’re sorting out the details right now.

2. CityForum – September and October

Hold the afternoon and evening of Wednesday 5th October for CityCamp 1.5, which we’ve called CityForum, and we’ll be holding at Sallis Benney. Rather than a second full CityCamp, this will be a afternoon-into-evening discussion event, rather like the Saturday of CityCamp. There’ll be a chance to see the outcome of the CityCamp projects, and a number of open discussion sessions during the day, ending up with a panel session where the results of those discussions are presented to key people from the city and its public institutions.

Don’t worry if you can’t participate on the day itself, because throughout the Brighton Digital Festival in September, we’ll be online holding preliminary discussions and picking topics for the day.

If you would like to help with the event, we’re looking for people who can help spread the word to every part of the city, who can help others get online to participate, who can support us with the technical side of the online discussions, and who want to take part as moderators or members of a citizens’ jury. If you can, please email brighton@demsoc.org or tell us at the meetup.

3. CityCamp 2 – March 2012

We haven’t got a definitive date for CityCamp Brighton 2 yet, but we hope to hold it on the first weekend in March, as we did in 2011. More details at the meetup, but you might want to pencil 2-4 March in the diary.

 

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