The Case for Manchester Open Data City and the Joys of Courting Corporate Philanthropy
Here come my notes from Tuesday’s Social Media Cafe Manchester event at the BBC’s offices on Oxford Road.
I’ve been a big fan of Social Media Cafe Manchester since being invited to be on the ‘panel of bloggers’ at the very first event in November 2008. Whenever I can I try to blog about each ‘#smc_mcr’ I attend, after the event.
This ‘post event review’, an electronic version of the notes I scribbled down on Tuesday evening, is rather cryptically titled The Case for Manchester Open Data City and the joys of Courting Corporate Philanthropy mostly because the two sessions I attended foretell a digital, always-on future where a city’s living data actively improves services for its citizens and corporate philanthropy is linked to the citizen’s active use of social media for social good.
So… on to the sessions I attended. You can view the full session list over at the Social Media Cafe Manchester community on Ning.
This is a relatively long post! You have been warned.
You can read it in sections:
Feb 2010 #smc_mcr session 1: 7 Wonders in 7 Days update
Feb 2010 #smc_mcr session 2: Manchester Open Data City
Feb 2010 #smc_mcr session 1: 7 Wonders in 7 Days update
I presented an update on my ‘social media for social good’ project, 7 Wonders in 7 Days, sharing the excellent news about a tie-up with Sport Relief.
Those following the 7 Wonders in 7 Days blog will be aware that blog posts had been thin on the ground over the last two months as I made arrangements to meet or speak to each of the 7 charities I am aiming to raise £777,000 for through the bold, round-the-world charity fundraising trip in October.
I shared that my meetings with the charities have seen us develop a number of exciting ways in which people can get involved with 7 Wonders in 7 Days through 2010.
The first is by joining in the fortnightly runs I have arranged for Sport Relief at the indoor running track at Manchester Regional Athletics Arena, the first of which on Saturday 27th February, 2pm – 4pm. Sign up here if you’re up for it! All levels of runner invited!! All I ask is that you make a minimum £5 donation to the charities first.
The second is a series of exciting Travel Companion competitions through which 7 lucky people will win a 3 day holiday to one of the 7 new wonders of the world!
Bold indeed.
As you may expect with a project as audacious as 7 Wonders in 7 Days, I always try and use the opportunity to present an update to the Social Media Cafe to ask for feedback from the really smart people at the event. I have always come away with some really pertinent and helpful advice and Tuesday’s night was no different.
Some of the fantastic advice I got about co-ordinating the 7 Travel Companion competitions include:
- Providing corporate sponsors with a clear picture of what they get by being involved in the project, particularly in view of the publicity opportunity provided by the link up with Sport Relief
- Managing the shortlisting process for winners in a two stage process, the first of which involves picking the most interesting videos. Only then does the popularity vote come in.
I will share more on all this as the competitions unfold.
And therein lies the second point in the cryptic title of this blog post.
I’m really privileged to be receiving some great support and advice from the national and regional press and fundraising team at Comic Relief for the Sport Relief ‘strand’ of the 7 Wonders in 7 Days project.
They have agreed to assist with promoting 7 Wonders in 7 Days and will be putting out two press releases for the project! The first one should be out within the next ten days.
I’m pretty excited about this opportunity to update the wider public on the 7 Wonders in 7 Days project, particularly in view of the enthusiastic support last July that saw the project pick up coverage in the Manchester Evening News, HowDo.co.uk and BBC Radio Manchester.
Over coming days, I’ll be approaching companies to sponsor travel involved in the 7 Wonders in 7 Days project and really needed to get a clear picture of what they would want hence my request at Social Media Cafe Manchester.
I’m really grateful for all the input I received not least that from Charlotte Morley from Democracy PR and Johnny Jay from Manchester music label Modern English on Tuesday as this was really helpful.
A big thank you to everyone who attended my session, you have all helped keep the momentum going on 7 Wonders in 7 Days! Though the project is fulfilling, it is hard work, bringing 7 Wonders in 7 Days thus far has been a completely voluntary undertaking. If you‘d like to help please get in touch!
A final thank you also to emerging journalist and writer, Eleanor who wrote about my session on her Lost in Notation blog, especially as this was her first social media cafe Manchester event.
Feb 2010 #smc_mcr session 2: Manchester Open Data City
OK, 7 Wonders in 7 Days update out of the way, here come my notes from Julian Tait from FutureEverything’s talk on the quest to make Manchester an Open Data City.
I’ve written these up from my scribbles in his talk. If you were there and heard it different please shout out in the comments. Thanks.
Through the development of the Western economies, cities traditionally had poorer habitation on the ‘East side’. This is due to development starting from the coastal areas and moving in eastward.
In effect, the prevailing winds often blew the stink to the ‘east side’. More often than not, the poor people living in the east side had no choice because they could not afford to move.
There exists a national data set for cities, they exist at post code and regional level.
However, to affect change you’d need to make decisions at local level.
This brings us onto the concept of local data for local people – hyper local news.
Cities hold this data generally. Some areas, boroughs monitor the data better. Examples of this data being used are projects such as:
mySociety.org’s TheyWorkForYou.com and Mapumental
Data.gov.uk
Apps for Democracy
Urban Eco Map
The idea with open data is to reconnect the public with the democratic process, leading to a more transparent process.
The US-run Apps for Democracy innovation contest, received a $2.3 million return on a $50,000 investment that opened up Washington DC’s DataCatalog:
“In the fall of 2008, DC’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer asked iStrategyLabs how it could make DC.gov’s revolutionary Data Catalog useful for the citizens, visitors, businesses and government agencies of Washington, DC. The Data Catalog contains all manner of open public data featuring real-time crime feeds, school test scores, and poverty indicators, and is the most comprehensive of its kind in the world.”
The UK isn’t far behind:
“Built with support from Channel 4’s 4IP programme, Mapumental is the culmination of an ambition mySociety.org has had for some time – to take the nation’s bus, train, tram, tube and boat timetables and turn them into a service that does vastly more than imagined by traditional journey planners.”
We also have Defra environmental noise maps.
However, Julian pointed out that there is currently no ability to compare the data against other things. In the noise map above it isn’t possible to see how this data correlates to house prices in a given area, for example.
Examples of open data include:
The real-time visualisation of air travel across the US by Aaron Koblin
Telling time with open real time data – a public transport mashup that is transferred from a Google Android to a watch via Bluetooth.
SF Trees – the UK-developed iPhone app that informs the viewer whether or not the tree they are standing in front of in San Fransisco is municipally planted or not!
Julian asserts that there is a market opportunity to develop things that have an impact, that give people in Manchester an understanding of what’s happening in the city.
Opening up the data empowers people to make more informed decisions from that data.
How will people use this data? This was a subject for much debate at the session.
Julian talked about the tyranny of transparency. Will people draw the wrong conclusions or the most convenient conclusions from Open Data? It remains to be seen.
By making something transparent you invite mis-communication.
I posed the question that London recently became an Open Data City and asked what had been made open. Apparently, nothing that wasn’t already publicly available!
The discussion went on to the uses of public transport information if it were truly open. A Manchester-based developer could write an iPhone app that sends out real-time updates of Manchester Tram Line information, for example.
There was some concern about how personally-identifiable the data could be. There was concern that unless anonymised the data could potentially lead to further ghettoisation of cities as expressed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
I also wondered whether there needed to be public policy for improving services based on real-time information delivered by applications using open data.
Julian added that something like this is in place in Vancouver where the Open Data City has an Open Information Covenant which means that if data isn’t used… it is no longer provided. Use it or lose it, if you will.
The key point, data has value.
All in all an incredibly interesting session. I couldn’t write fast enough!
The discussion could be condensed to these two points (summarised by a smart gentleman at the end whose name I couldn’t catch):
- Fear over control – this can be allayed through opening a dialogue before opening up sensitive data sets
- Info overload – this can be managed through opening uncontroversial data for such things as Bus map applications.
Phew, that’s it!
If you found that helpful, please let me know by leaving me a comment.
Image Credit: Social Media Manchester Livestream video by Josh aka @Technicalfault
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