Tag: swimming

Stuff I've seen June 10th through to June 19th

These are my links for June 10th through June 19th:

  • Neighbourhoods Learning Together — BVSC – Course available for community activists in North Birmingham and Sandwell: “30 places are available and we want to the group to reflect the diversity of the area. If there are barriers or support needs which are making you hesitate, then let us know and we’ll see what we can do. The venues for the sessions will be wheel chair accessible.”
  • Telford & Wrekin CVS-news from the Development Team » Blog Archive » Telford & Wrekin CVS BASIS Project – “The whole purpose of which is to recruit, support and train 50 local voluntary and community organisations, in the art of social media, so that they can implement it, to ultimately support group sustainability”
  • Swimming pool data scraping: comparing opening times | Where can we swim? – “Birmingham City Council’s leisure centre website isn’t an easy place to look for information, harder still to try to take data, but that’s just what I’ve spent some considerable time trying to do….” Our own Andrew Brightwell continues his one man campaign to scrutinise availability of swimming pools.
  • The power of conversations « Francesca Elston – “…conversations make people happier and more useful.”
  • Pentagon hunts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in bid to gag website | Media | The Guardian – The Daily Beast, a US news reporting and opinion website, reported that Pentagon investigators are trying to track down Julian Assange – an Australian citizen who moves frequently between countries – after the arrest of a US soldier last week who is alleged to have given the whistleblower website a classified video of American troops killing civilians in Baghdad.
  • Cutswatch | Society | guardian.co.uk – Public services face the harshest cuts in decades. We want to know what’s happening in your area
  • Futurebuilders — loan business scrapped, new direction will be grants for neighbourhood organisations « The BSSEC blog – “Civil Society Media website reports that Nick Hurd, the civil society minister, has confirmed that Futurebuilders — New Labour’s flagship loans-plus-support model for investing in third sector development, managed by the Social Investment Business — is “effectively closed for business”. In future the £200m fund will be dedicated to providing grants to stimulate the formation of neighbourhood-based organisations, a clear change of direction under the coalition’s new ‘big society’ policies.
    The Office for Civil Society (the replacement for the Office of the Third Sector) has also confirmed that Capacitybuilders and the youth volunteering organisation v — both major New Labour initiatives — are “under review”.”

Scrutinising swimming pool facilities

I’ve been a bit annoyed with the provision of swimming facilities here in Brum for a while. Nick Booth suggested I compare them with those of the other core cities to see how Birmingham rated. So I’ve just had a little go.

What I did

First I went to each council’s website, found its list of leisure facilities and then checked each one to work out which were swimming pools. Occasionally, in the case of Manchester, that was easy because it was quite handy. In other cases it was a pain, because the council had different ideas about presentation. Anyway, I managed to make a crude tally of the number of pool facilities.

I wanted to do more, but as this spreadsheet shows it’s hard to get all the data.

Newcastle Swimming Pools

Some councils provide more information than others, some are completely inconsistent about what they do present. You’ll also see that, scandalously, I’ve added some Scottish cities and left out the likes of Sheffield in my list.

I then had a look on the same sites for population statistics. I didn’t always find them. On some occasions the website provided a mid-2008 census estimate, and sometimes it was just the numbers from the 2001 census. Sometimes it was in a nice HTML format, and other times it was buried in a PDF.

What I produced

I managed to collate the information into this incredibly crude spreadsheet, where I divided the population of the city by the number of pool facilities.

Swimming pool comparison

I then used Many Eyes to upload my spreadsheet and turn it into a visualisation, which you can see here:-

Now, this isn’t a great analysis. After all, Birmingham has Moseley Road Baths, which is something like 20m long, while the Manchester Aquatics Centre has two 50m pools in one facility. Yet they each get a score of one. Deeply unfair. If I could find out how long and how wide each pool was then I could add it all up and then compare the total swimming area to population. But that depth (pun intended) of information isn’t available.

So what does this mean?
For me this is a scrutiny issue, because working out how Birmingham compares to other cities in terms of facilities helps us to understand whether it needs to improve. But the information isn’t there, or if it is it’s inconsistent. And it’s not just geeks who’d like to know how big a swimming pool is, how long it’s open for and even how warm it is. It’s all information that’s relevant to users.

What can be done?
Making comparisons between councils’ services would be made easier if we all were engaged in a discussion about what information needs to be made available and in what formats that information is presented in.

As this little experiment demonstrates, it’s not technically challenging to collect data and then use a free, web-based tool like Many Eyes to interpret it. And, for the time being, I’m considering setting up a site that looks specifically at swimming pools to work out how that process could become more useful and accurate.