He’s a WordPress developer (please join our campaign to get WordPress to allow embeds of ScraperWiki views! Send them emails) for Lichfield Live and a big engager with the local community (which comes with the local site territory). His experience working with public data has taught him a few things:

1. Public data mostly comes with little context. It’s hard to understand because you don’t know how it’s been collected, for what purpose and by whom. These all contribute to how well you can trust the data.
2. Once you start with one piece of data you want to mash it with others and that can be one heck of a headache because you get into all sorts of issues of matching IDs, especially on the local level with things like Super Output Areas, Postcodes, Constituencies and authority boundaries.
3. There are lots and lots of tools and lots and lots of people to help you

So it’s no wonder he found ScraperWiki, and we’re glad he’s finding it useful. We hope he and other hyperlocal sites use us to make the tools their users need, and if one community wants local data liberated the others will too. So collaborate with your code (and pilfer)!

ScraperWiki makes gathering data that isn’t in a reusable format much easier. It makes learning how to code tons easier than anywhere else and not at all scary! It makes benefiting from the collective awesomeness of the open data community so much easier. – Philip John

By Philip John, Journal Local. This has been cross-posted on the Journal Local blog.

It may be a tiny city but Lichfield has shown that it has some great talent at the Hacks and Hackers Hack Day.

Sponsored by Lichfield District Council and Lichfield-based Journal Local, the day was held at the George Hotel and attended by a good selection of local developers and journalists – some coming from much further afield.

Once the introductions were done and we’d all contributed a few ideas the work got started and five teams quickly formed around those initial thoughts.

The first two teams decided to look into Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) and Information Asset Registers (IARs). The first of these scraped information from 470 councils to show which of these published information about PFIs. The results showed that only 10% of councils actually put out any details of PFIs, highlighting a lack of openness in that area.

Also focused on PFIs was the ‘PFI wiki’ project which scraped the Partnerships UK database of PFIs and re-purposed it to allow deeper interrogation, such as by region and companies. It clearly paves the way for an OpenCharities style site for PFIs.

Future care needs was the focus of the third team who mapped care homes along with information on ownership, public vs private status and location. The next step, they said, is to add the number of beds and match that to the needs of the population based on demographic data, giving a clearer view of whether the facilities exist to cater for the future care needs in the area.

A Lichfield-related project was the focus of the fourth group who aimed to create a comprehensive guide to events going on in Lichfield District. Using about four or five scrapers, they produced a site that collated all the events listing sites serving Lichfield into one central site with a search facility. The group also spawned a new Hacks/Hackers group to continue their work.

Last but not least, the fifth group worked on flood warning information. By scraping the Environment Agency web site they were able to display on a map, the river level gauges and the flood warning level so that at a glance it’s possible to see the water level in relation to the flood warning limit.

So after a long day Lizzie Thatcher and Rita Wilson from Lichfield District Council joined us to judge the projects. They came up with a clever matrix of key points to rate the projects by and decided to choose the ‘what’s on’ and ‘flood warning’ projects as joint winners, who each share a prize of £75 in Amazon vouchers.

The coveted ScraperWiki mug also went to the ‘what’s on’ project for their proper use of ScraperWiki to create good quality scrapers.

Pictures from the event by Nick Brickett. Click through to view slideshow…

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“Lichfield District Council have been publishing open data for a while now, and it seems a good fit to put on a day where we can showcase the data we have published, as well as encourage people to do something with it,” said council webmaster Stuart Harrison.

“We’re not precious though, and if something is built using other public data, we’ll be just as happy!”

The details:

What? Scraperwiki, the award-winning new screen scraper and data mining tool, funded by 4iP and Lichfield District Council are putting on a one day practical hack day* in Lichfield, Staffordshire at which web developers and designers (hackers) will pair up with journalists and bloggers or anyone with an interest in media and communications (hacks) to produce a number of projects and stories based on public data. It’s all part of the ScraperWiki UK & Ireland Hacks and Hackers tour.

Who’s it for? We hope to attract ‘hacks’ and ‘hackers’ from all different types of backgrounds – across programming, media and communications.

What will I get out of it? The aim is to show journalists how to use programming and design techniques to create online news stories and features; and vice versa, to show programmers how to find, develop, and polish stories and features. To see what happened at our past events in Liverpool and Birmingham visit the ScraperWiki blog.

How much? NOTHING! It’s free, thanks to our sponsors, Lichfield District Council and Journal Local.

What should I bring? We would encourage people to come along with ideas for local ‘datasets’ that are of interest. In addition we will create a list of suggested data sets at the introduction on the morning of the event but flexibility is key for this event. If you have a laptop, please bring this too.

So what exactly will happen on the day? Armed with their laptops and WIFI, journalists and developers will be put
into teams of around four to develop their ideas, with the aim of
finishing final projects that can be published and shared publicly. Each team will then present their project to the whole group. Overall winners will receive a prize at the end of the day.

*Not sure what a hack day is? Let’s go with the Wikipedia definition: It “an event where developers, designers and people with ideas gather to build ‘cool stuff'”…

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