Local Public Data Panel - first meeting
The Local Public Data Panel, chaired by Professor Nigel Shadbolt held its first meeting on 19 January.
The Panel is looking to encourage local government and public bodies to release data in free and re-usable formats - data held locally is every bit as valuable as the data placed on data.gov.uk already by central government departments. Things like recycling information, street works, planning applications and parking fines are what people want to know about the places they live. We want to see it made public.
The first meeting kicked off work looking at the data flows between central and local government, developing standard formats for local data so it can be linked to other data and ideas for drawing out best practice examples from the many local authorities that are already using public data to inform and engage their citizens.
The best thing we can do to convince more local authorities to make data freely available is by spotlighting the great work of those authorities already reaping the benefits. If you have any good examples you'd like to highlight to us and to the data.gov.uk community please add them in a comment below.
The next Panel meeting is on Monday 1 March. We will update you soon on further activities.
Comments (2)
Local Public Data
I am very enthusiastic about this site and I hope that you and the local councils can fulfil your objectives and get people more involved in their councils. After all public workers and the decisions they make should be accountable and accessible to the public.
Surrey Heath Borough Data
We have started making our street naming and numbering data available through OpenStreetMap.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.342891&lon=-0.714577&zoom=18&layers...
We're also looking at pushing a data feed out for planning application locations. Although these are already available on our 'My Surrey Heath' application we would like to see private firms aggregating local authority data into specialised apps that are free for use to the public.