Tag: Civic Dashboard

#Opendata, cities, civic tools and Make it Local 10 things to make opendata work in local government – some links from #tal12 in Birmingham

I have a collection of half baked thoughts following the truly excellent Talk About Local unconference in Birmingham on Saturday.

Whilst they stew into something edible I just wanted to quickly share some very useful links plus a list of ideas generated as part of Make it Local – the work done by Nesta on opendata and local government.

First the links – all mentioned by Jon Kingsbury  (twitter) – who’s driving the Nesta Destination local programme.

  • http://civiccommons.org/  is a us website which “is a marketplace for open innovation in government, tracking 585 apps in 199 cities. ”  As Jon said – son’t re-invent the wheel, check ideas against this site.
  • http://www.listpoint.co.uk/  Jon described as “an open platform for code lists standards”collates a lot of work on data standards, what they means and saves time and energy for opendata work.
Make it Local - opendata and local governement programme from Nesta
Make it Local - opendata and local government programme from Nesta

Make it Local –  was a project that Jon helped run for Nesta which  supported local authorities to work with local developers on open and data tools.   One of  the projects – for example – was Birmingham’s Civic Dashboard.  Nesta created this make it local toolkit. – (download as a pdf ) which gives from very practical thoughts on how to make data work in government more successful.  I cite the whole thing below, simply because i think it’s worth sharing:

Ten tips for creating online local public services using open data

nesta.org.uk/areas_of_work/public_services_lab/make_it_local

1 Generate the idea

Focus on the needs of the Read more