Project update: Learn Local First

 

This post is by project leader Sue Korman

Learn Local First emerged from an original idea by Sue Korman and reached the finalists out of over 50 projects presented to City Camp 2011.

It will be a ‘citypedia’ of Brighton & Hove for and by KS3 students.

The aims are to fully involve Brighton students in a real online collaborative project to make a unique resource about the city for schools that incorporates local data

Its home page is a list of local topics suggested by a Year 7 group.

http://learnlocal.dev.scip.org.uk/

The next phase of Learn Local First is all set to begin after Easter with a class of year 7 students at Patcham School who will review, design and develop the directory

Thanks to the City Camp team and judges from 2010, Laura Tyler, Andrew Brightwell, Mark James, Daniel Clarke and the members of Digital Education Brighton for their help and support.

CityCamping 2012

This post is by Simon Bannister, who was at CityCamp 1 in 2011 and is coming again this year.

One of the aims of CityCamp this year is to widen participation from the community generally and the B&H voluntary sector in particular and 9 February saw a kind of launch for City Camp 2 at an information evening for community groups.

Around 60 residents/reps from various groups turned out to find out more about City Camp, and also more about the substantially increased prize pot of £20k provided by Brighton & Hove City Council and NHS Sussex.

The aim of the funding and the projects judges will be looking to support are quite broad and loosely defined- aside from some administative particulars, funded projects will need to: “Advance the goals of City Camp – increasing participation or wellbeing in the city using new technologies or innovative practice in public or voluntary service and openly sharing the results”

The event and the funding criteria is slewed toward social media (though not exclusively) and the evening discussion raised many  of questions about this aspect, from attempting to define  ‘social media’ , looking at issues of participation and digital exclusion and talking about the various platforms available and how they might best be used to accomplish certain tasks. It was clear that not everyone was starting from the same point, with some individuals and organisations far more at home in the digital environment and understanding its potential than others, and recognising this, it is really useful that a first Social Media Surgery has been planned for Feb 20th which could help groups work out how they can make best use of online places in advance of the main City Camp event. (HERE for info and to reserve a place)

Although I spend a lot of time online and offline with people who see internet technologies as a part of their daily terrain, much of my work puts me in contact with the many people who don’t. Finding ways to describe the benefits of internet based technology to people and groups who are inexperienced at using it and may be sceptical is an ongoing challenge, but being aware of the issues of digital exclusion isn’t a reason not to engage; it intensifies the need for the approach taken by City Camp2 and underlines the value of the particular funding emphasis on grassroots community organisations developing their work online.

Public services are increasingly aware of the ‘digital by default’ challenges and benefits and our council in Brighton & Hove is investing in its digital presence – it is becoming an easier and better way of getting things done, whether that is finding out about council activity and taking part in consultation, or commenting real time on service delivery.  As one mundane example, my local Local Action Team has found that using Twitter to send a picture of flytipping to the council, is a far more efficient way of reporting and getting action – and also it puts the complaint and response into the public realm and gives it a transparency which other approaches could not easily match.

That City Camp this year is looking for greater involvement from Brighton & Hove voluntary sector, and has been able to focus energy, resources and real cash toward making this happen, gives so much extra value. Not only work given to help develop projects, and money to develop them with, but a really serious attempt to involve those groups working with the most marginalised and excluded communities across the city, helping them to find new ways of translating the benefits of ‘online’ to improve the opportunities and quality of life for those they work with.

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.

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