[open-economics] Local Policy Decision-Making Tool - the Blitz Challenge

Mon Mar 19 13:41:05 UTC 2012

Hi,

Yesterday we got together to discuss whether we could build a simple tool
which could assist local policy decision-making with the aim of  making
"the city/town/neighborhood a better place", which could be potentially
submitted to the InnoCentive Smart Systems Challenge, but would be also
generally interesting to develop as a project.

# Idea

For the Open Economics and Open Spending it would be interesting to have a
tool for analysing how fiscal policy is actually related to outcomes in
particular fields - e.g. is there a relationship between crime prevention
local government spending and crime rates? Are wards with higher crime
rates also the ones receiving the higher per capita crime prevention
funding? The same could be done in terms of health, educational and
environmental spending.

The interesting/policy aspect of this is to analyse the position of some
wards relative to the means/fitted values - i.e. what is the position of
the London ward e.g. Gypsy Hill relative to the mean? Should the government
invest more in that ward? Probably wards are currently not making fiscal
decisions based on their relative position compared to other wards - but
such a tool could put pressure on them to justify spending decisions and
possibly direct funds to areas which most need them.

# Contacts

I am cc-ing Gianfranco Gliozzo, who has extensive experience in geospatial
mapping and my colleague Lucy Chambers, who is coordinating Open Spending,
who might be interested in collaborating on this project.

# Data

There is a lot "outcomes" data in terms of social progress - life
expectancy, the index of multiple deprivation
and there are already nice map visualisations.
http://data.london.gov.uk/visualisations/atlas/ward-profiles-2010/atlas.html?indicator=i8&date=2009

I have been less able to find the spending data for each London ward. Lucy
has pointed out some useful statistics under:
http://www.spotlightonspend.org.uk/ and
http://openlylocal.com/councils/spending, but we would ideally need exact
statistics about how much each London ward is spending on education,
streets, etc.

Do you know of ward-level government spending datasets for London?

# Framework

Here is the pad to post ideas and links:
http://econ.okfnpad.org/smartsystems
If we find ward-level spending data and would show-case how this analysis
could for the an example of a certain field we could submit that for the
Innocentive deadline on Saturday (March 24), otherwise we could develop
that for the Data Journalism Google award, which is due in about a month..
(cc-ed David, John and Federica).
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