One of the focusses of the Open Data Cities work is to encourage regional educational establishments to programme Open Data activity. There is a need to encourage service and application development skills and importantly, until the market for Open Data applications can sustain itself, more applications and services beyond ‘proof of concept’ need to be developed.
To this end, I was invited to talk about Open Data at a workshop and seminar organised by Gerd Kortuem Lancaster University today – 21st March.
As preparation Gerd and myself sourced datasets and applications to use in the session. I would give background to the Open Data Cities project and case for Open Data and the assembled people would then come up with some cool ideas. It sounds a bit like a standard hackday but there were a number of differences that created some interesting ideas.
1. Sample datasets were provided in advance, these had been chosen from data.gov.uk, datagm.org.uk and Vancouver.
2. The workshop was multi-disciplinary so included coders, social scientists, designers and other disciplines
3. Although some of the participants knew each other, the uniting feature was that they were all post grads or lecturers from Lancaster University who were interested in finding out more about Open Data
4. People were arbitrarily put into work groups
5. The groups were given an hour to come up with an idea which they then had to present with the data that they had chosen and groups then developed the ideas
The event was mostly structured but crucially groups were allowed to come up with any idea as long as it could be realised by the data that they had been given. The mixing of the participants forced people to work together across disciplines and also probably reduced impact of preconceived ideas.
Obviously the availability of available datasets predetermined to a degree what groups developed. As there is a lot of good quality data available from Trafford a number of applications were developed for that area but these could be ported to other areas if similar data became available. There were also a number of applications based on Vancouver data.
Some of the ideas that came out of the workshop included.
An application that would help politicians campaign more effectively using Open Data. A bit like having a pocket researcher and advisor. This could also be used be non politicians as well.
Two Vancouver based applications that merged data around street vendors, public spaces, toilets and water fountains
An application called Tree Hugger that identified trees, encouraged you to go find specific species of trees, photograph and share.
And several applications to encourage people to move into the Trafford Borough, marrying up crime stats, school results, amenities and public transport.
It is obvious that by engaging with HE and FE and demonstrating the opportunities that are out there, cool ideas can be created and realised. Education is a crucible of fluid ideas and differing approaches and the latent creativity within these establishments has the potential to boost Open Data innovation.
