Team post: Two days at Open Data Camp

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Matthew Somerville

At SocietyWorks we believe in transparency. One of the ways we live this value is by working in the open, and giving our team members space on our blog to write about what they’re working on, something they’re interested in or even perhaps a mistake or challenge they’ve learned from.

In this blog post our Head of Development, Matthew Somerville, writes about his experience attending the Open Data Camp 9 unconference in Manchester on 6 and 7 July 2024.

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Last weekend, I went to the Open Data Camp 9 unconference in Manchester. I hadn’t been to an Open Data Camp before; it was very well organised, with good food, lots of volunteers, a creche, people from Drawnalism making lovely pictorial summaries of many of the sessions (see the website link above, and I’ll embed some from the sessions I went to below so you can see how amazing they are), they organised accommodation (if you needed it), and more.

For those who might not know what is meant by “open data”, there was a session about that – there’s a really good summary in the session notes at Open Data 101: Open Day for Newbies (2024 edition). The definition given there is: “Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone, subject at most only to the requirement to attribute and share alike.”

Here at mySociety and SocietyWorks, we use, reuse, and publish a lot of open data. For example, MapIt is based on open data, as is FixMyStreet and FixMyStreet Pro. TheyWorkForYou is repurposing open data into a slightly better format and WhatDoTheyKnow also includes a lot of open data.

The venue was the Engineering building of the University of Manchester, which was round the corner from where I went to school (more on that later), and perfectly designed for an unconference, with four separate rooms all coming off a central hub room for food/ drinks/ chats. They had a Lego board to show where people had come from, and a pile of old out-of-copyright Manchester maps.

At this unconference, the pitches were ideas that people wanted to talk about and discuss as a group with interested others – I was happy just to see what came up and hopefully have some interesting conversations.

Day one

In the morning, I first went to a talk about deleting data and having too much data, which was a broad look at the costs of maintenance and APIs vs datasets. I raised the idea of it being much easier to maintain/look after if the open data is embedded within the processes of that data (e.g. your street light asset management system leading directly to the publication of that street light data, not requiring a special export to a special open data platform that could be subject to the vagaries of the current postholders). Following this I attended a discussion about the digital/data priorities of the first 100 days of the new Labour government.

In the afternoon, I went to a session about data on elected officials / elections by Open Data Manchester, who had made e.g. a poster of deprivation vs representation, and were looking at doing more with councillor information and data. I contributed some info on how TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem works, our combined IMD dataset, and the popolo standard for representative data.

Then it was over to Owen Boswarva’s session on the campaign/case for open addresses. This has always been a topic dear and core to us; WriteToThem and TheyWorkForYou cannot provide accurate answers for every single postcode due to the lack of open address data. I/we were well-known by everyone there, and it was a look at the current situation and what could be done to push this forward. The new government is of course one possibility, and the new Business & Trade Minister (in charge of Royal Mail, if not Ordnance Survey) has met with people on this exact topic.

The last session I went to on the first day was about web scraping, open data, and ethics. Lot of self-awareness at this, looking at my and our history with TheyWorkForYou, Mapumental, traintimes, Theatricalia, someone else’s project on scraping Warm Spaces locations, and what differences are there in terms of ethicalness and behaviour.

Day two

Day two, after catching the same bus I used to catch as a kid to school (ever so slightly more expensive now), I went to a session by two people from Raileasy, wanting to talk about open data success stories in public transport. Lots of good chat about train data, bus data and the pros and cons of decentralisation.

Being that it’s a phrase we use often here at SocietyWorks when talking about what we help local authorities with, I couldn’t not go to a session called “Closing the feedback loop” by someone from Open Data Scotland discussing how do/can producers of open data be made aware of how their data is used; e.g. in the government case, generally so they know they shouldn’t just turn it off (though turning it off does bring people out of the woodwork, certainly!). Other possibilities discussed included asking for an email as ‘payment’ for getting the data, and in order to get notified of updates or deletions; or having a place to show/link to examples of how that specific data is used.

After lunch, the organisers ran a “go outside and explore” session to try and notice things you might not normally notice, with an animal avatar. I wanted to go back and see my old school, so I co-opted the octopus group to do this, and we had a nice walk around the area (which again, is quite changed from the 1990s and the Crescents), finding a wildflower meadow while we discussed open data.

Lastly, I went to data horror and data joy stories, where you can probably imagine some of the things talked about – one thing I mentioned was the opening up of Bank Holiday data in an official GOV.UK JSON file, which meant I could submit a Pull Request on GitHub when there was a mistake, and from there find out that Scotland had forgotten to create a Bank Holiday in 2010 and 2011…

Other sessions I didn’t go to, but would have liked to…

• Refreshing our approach to government transparency
• Sustainability: how can open data help?
• Public/private sector marriage guidance (from, understandably, a data point of view)
• AI: Ethics and implications for open data
• Open data, communities, and the role of gamification

And probably more – do take a quick look through their blog.

That’s it! Thanks for having me, Open Data Camp!