For this, and for most of the remainder of these sessions, while I took quite a lot of notes, I was generally concentrating on what was being said, rather than who was doing the saying. Where possible, I will indicate who led an individual session, so that you might know where this all originated from.

In this particular case, it was Emma Mulqueeny.

Rewired State was basically a recommendation to free up government data for re-use. The premise behind this is that it’s our data; after all, it’s our taxes that have paid for the darn thing to be collected in the first place, so why shouldn’t it be available for us to use?

This is one issue when it relates to central government, where it may not come as a surprise to learn that there tends to be a central repository for this data, but it’s obviously a different matter at the local government level, as for the most part each Local Authority hangs on to its own data and does not share with partners, let alone the world at large.

But where the local government data can be shared, you can start to do larger comparisons.

Andrew Walkingshaw, a chappie from Timetric.com spoke about what their developments were doing along these lines. Basically, where they could get their hands on LA data, they would, and this information could then be collated and compared with other local authorities to say how they change over time.

That’s rather one of the key points. They name is a clue: Timetric. In other words, they want time-related metrics. One of the things they wanted to know was what sort of these data comparisons would be useful to councils as a whole, to councillors, and also to residents.

I would encourage anyone to wander over and register: you can search for various sorts of council and government information that is available online, you can produce graphs on the change over time, you can produce comparison overlays between two different versions and so on. And the best part is that it is specifically designed to be shared: it will give you the copy-and-paste code necessary to embed these graphs within your own website.

For example, here’s the results of sixty seconds work — changes in Council Tax rates in Gateshead and Gloucester…

This is a great thing for all of us who want to share and re-use local government data. It’s brilliant. Go over to Timetric, register, check it out.

They wished to encourage all data sets that do not contain personal information (or at least versions of these data sets with the personal identifiers removed) to be published on the web in such a way that comments could be made — so that people could comment and say what they would like to use the data for.

An important difference was stressed between what was seen as LA’s standard ways of working “let’s not publish anything until it’s ready and we’re happy with it” and the preferred option of making a rawer, less refined data set available to the public (or at the very least a section of the public to beta-test) to say what they wanted to do with it. After all, if you’re championing digital engagement, you do need to engage somewhere along the line.

Possibly the most useful suggestion made for this sort of data was for Local Area Assessments (LAAs), where the councils need to assess their results against their chosen basket of up to 35 of the 198 National Indicators, and then in the Comprehensive Area Assessments (CAAs), compare their results to how nearby authorities are doing. Obviously if Timetric can be given access to this sort of information, it would not only be easier for councils to compare their results for the CAAs, it would be easy for anyone else to compare the results also.

For some this might require a change in mindset: instead of jealously guarding all of their information, they need to make it open to the public. Remember, the public have paid for it to be collected. I don’t expect this mindset to be changed dramatically overnight, so I’d maybe expect the first data published to be where councils can see a benefit to themselves in doing so.

…and opening up the baskets of Local Area Indicators (I mean, I presume the councils need to publish the information anyway?) would be a pretty good start. It would make it easier for councils and the public to accurately compare data.