[OKFN-EN] UK opendata census

Thu Mar 20 10:37:47 UTC 2014

On 18 March 2014 18:20, Andrea Raimondi <raimondi.and at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>  as you might know from Rufus the open data census<http://gb-city.census.okfn.org>is online. I've completed the census for Nottingham and some other cities
> are about to start or already started (Cambridge, London, Sheffield..).
>

Great to see the info on Nottingham Andrea! We're starting to get some
reasonable coverage but it would be great to get more:

http://gb-city.census.okfn.org/

Also we're on the lookout for folks interested in being reviewers and
helping to check submissions and generally give advice to submitters. If
you're interested just ping on or off-list :-)

> You can contribute as I did, working on your own, finding data around and
> adding them to your city's slot. However, please consider to involve
> citizen's participation.
>
> Indeed, the ODcensus can be seen as a very simple and basic tool to
> organise hackathon accessible to all citizens, no matter if they don't have
> dev skills, and spread the value of opendata for local communities -which
> is the aim of the census.
>

I think this is a great point - you don't need to be a coder or data
wrangler to contribute. Just an internet connection and a bit of search
engine skills!

I also think there is a way that we can take the census beyond simple
tracking to actually doing something with the data. For example, if budget
or spending data for a city is listed as available then we could provide
instructions on how to turn that into a small local budget app using
OpenSpending.

> During the international open data day in London the italian setup<http://it-city.census.okfn.org>for the same census has been prepared. Maurizio Napolitano (one of the OKFN
> ambassador for Italy) is doing a great job and lots of cities and local
> communities have started to fill the census.
>

The Italian results so far are very impressive! We need to catch-up ;-)

Rufus
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