Make It Local Scotland

8/11/2019 Make It Local Scotland

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Make it localScotland


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Introduction 3Context 5Edinburgh Outdoors 13Smart Journey 19Glasgow Gritting 26Into Orkney 33Conclusions 37Acknowledgements 42

Contents


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Scottish councils were invited to submit ideas which would offerresidents and/or visitors a practical service using the data setswhich would be opened up by the local authorities.

Importantly the councils had to commit to the principle of open the data sets would be opened, the code would be shared so itcould be reused by others and the services had to be interactiveso that content could be directly uploaded by users. As such,this differs from normal web or app development.

Make it Local Scotland is a programme developed bythe innovation charity Nesta during 2011 and 2012which aimed to encourage collaboration between

local authorities and digital media developers toprovide innovative, web-based or mobile services for their communities making use of the data heldby the local authority.

1.0 Introduction

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1.1 Introduction

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Aberdeen City Council & Aberdeenshire Council for a digital service to help residents inAberdeenshire to share local travel information;

The City of Edinburgh Council for a web servicewhich enables residents and visitors to get the

most out of Edinburghs local parks;

Glasgow City Council for a website whichshows information on real time road andpavement gritting;

Orkney Islands Council for a digital servicewhich enables users to explore and learn

about the archaeological sites in the Orkneys.

Four proposals were chosen and each received25,000 to develop their digital services.

Our hope is that these projects may be informative to other localauthorities and organisations who may wish to emulate or learnfrom them. The digital frameworks (the code which underpinsthe sites) and content (data) of all the sites have been made freelyavailable on www.github.com and www.europecommons.org

They were:


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However, it is only recently thatinformation has become truly big.Around 1,200 exabytes of digital dataare generated every year, and this isset to grow by 60 per cent per annum. 1 90 per cent of the worlds data has beengenerated over the past 2 years. 2

The ubiquity of dataData has always been powerful particularly when setfree. In 1864 the physician Dr John Snow made historyby tracing the source of a cholera outbreak to a Sohowater pump by mapping all the infection cases on amap. Many centuries before that, the rulers of 11th

century England gathered unprecedented amounts ofinformation on the lands and livestock of feudal barons,later to be compiled in the momentous Doomsday bookand used to determine tax rates.

2.0 Context

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The source of this boom can be tracedto the advent of the internet and thecontinuous improvements in processingpower and data storage.

These technologies have enabled datato be collected easily, stored cheaply anddisseminated widely whether that isinformation on a homes energy usage,

a citys traffic jams, a neighbourhoodsrecycling gures or a schoolsperformance results. Thus data is allaround us; we just need to determinehow to make use of it.

1 NESTA (2010) Big Data: The power and possibilities of big data. London: NESTA2 See: - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130522085217.html


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2.1 Context

63 McKinsey (2011) Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity.4 See The Economist (2012) Beggar Thy Neighbour [Article], 8th December 2012. www.prescribinganalytics.com

Yet the benets of data are not limitedto the private sphere. Local authorities,public services and civil society have

just as much to gain, especially ifthat data is made open and freelyavailable for anyone to use.

The promise of open data Perhaps unsurprisingly it is the private sector that has donemost to harness the power of data. Reward cards have beenused for many years by supermarkets to collect informationon the spending patterns of individual consumers. Likewise,internet browsers have routinely logged users movements

and used them to tailor advertisements that are most likelyto capture an individuals attention. So lucrative is the use ofdata by private organisations that McKinsey estimate it couldimprove operating margins by over 60 per cent. 3

Public sector datasets are alreadybeing analysed to identify efficiencysavings and potential improvementsin the quality of services. Last year, forinstance, the tech start-up Mastodonin partnership with the medicalactivist Ben Goldacre identied200m worth of potential savingsin statin prescriptions by crunchingavailable data on GP expenditure. 4


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2.1 Context

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5 See The Daily Telegraph (2009) Death rate among heart surgery patients is falling. [Article], 30th July 2009.6 Fox, M. S. (2013) City Data: Big, Open and Linked [Working paper] University of Toronto.7 Johnson, P. (2012) Time for a Plan C? Slow growth and scal choices. London: RSA.8 Pollock, I. (2011) On the trail of the offshore tax dodgers [Article], 13th December 2011, cited in Yiu, C. (2012)

The Big Data Opportunity: Making government faster, smarter and more personal. London: Policy Exchange.9 See http://www.mysociety.org/

Similarly, a study by the Society forCardiothoracic Surgery suggested thatmortality in coronary artery surgeryhad fallen by a fth as a result ofpublic reporting of individual surgeonoutcomes. 5 Cities and local authoritiesare also feeling the benets. In NewYork datasets from 19 different

agencies including the police andbuildings teams were combined to helpidentify places that had been illegallyconverted into residential properties.The result was a sharp increase in thenumber of eviction issues ordered anda vefold increase in efficiency. 6

UK Government departmental spending

is set to fall by nearly 19 percent in realterms between 2010-11 and 2017-18,while the budgets of local authoritiesare being cut by a third over thespending review period. 7

Against this backdrop it is vital that thepublic sector makes greater use of theiravailable assets, not least the immenseamount of latent data at their disposal.HMRC, for example, is reported to havemore than 80 times the amount of dataheld by the British Library. 8

Yet the promise of open data goes beyondthe identication of efficiency savings. Itsvalue also lies in improving accountabilityand legitimacy among decision-makers.Indeed, one of the rst uses of open datawas to hold to account people in positionsof power. Two prominent examples areTheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow;apps that use government data to keep

voters abreast of their MPs activities. 9

Perhaps even more powerful, however,is the potential for open data to be usedto enhance peoples decision-making whether that be in nding out the bestschools to send their children, identifyingthe most efficient transport routesto and from work, or deciding whichneighbourhood is the safest to live in.


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Many UK government departments havegone one step further by creating theirown data-crunching platforms. TheDepartment for Communities and LocalGovernment created a local authoritydashboard to visualise informationabout places across the UK, including onwellbeing, deprivation and obesity levels. 12 Likewise, the Department for Educationlaunched a School Tool to help parents track

educational performance, while the HomeOffice built police.uk to show details ofcriminal incidents at a hyperlocal level. 13

Building the infrastructureWith the benets of open data well documented, it is little surprisethat the UK Government has placed it high on its agenda. Early on intheir tenure the Coalition promised to set government data free andextend transparency to every area of public life, with one of their rstactions being to release information on every expenditure over 500in local authorities. 10 Since then it has made an increasing amount of

data available on the data.gov.uk website, which now contains over17,000 datasets. 11 Moreover, several datasets that were once chargedfor have since been made free, including large amounts of the vitalOrdnance Survey map data.

2.2 Context

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The Open Data White Paper launched last yearsets out plans to build on these initial efforts,including by working towards the Open DataCerticate of organisational best practice. 14

Many local authorities have also created theirown platforms. Lambeth in Numbers, the LondonDatastore and Open Glasgow are all platformsthat enable residents to nd and use data setsabout their local area, including about free schoolmeals, tourism, health, housing and land use.

Independent initiatives have also arisen tocomplement these efforts. Foremost amongthese is the Open Data Institute (ODI), which waslaunched in 2012 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to raiseawareness of open data and champion its usebeyond the technology community. 15

10 HM Government (2010) The Coalition: Our programme for government. London: Cabinet Office.11 See http://www.mysociety.org/12 See http://opendatacommunities.org/dashboard13 http://www.police.uk/14 HM Government (2012) Open Data White Paper: Unleashing the potential. London: Cabinet Office.15 See http://theodi.org/


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Moreover, the data that is available canoften be difficult to compare. Many localauthorities have developed their ownmeasures of performance and usersatisfaction, making benchmarkinga challenge. Similarly, each devolvedgovernment has its own way ofcollecting and distributing data, withfour separate statistics bodies in placeacross the UK.

Barriers to progress However, for all the progress that has been made in recent yearsthere are several barriers that prevent the potential of open databeing fully realised. One of these is the supply of open data. Despiteadding reams of new datasets online, unlike the US there is no publiccommitment to making data available by default. Instead it hasbeen common to drip-feed information dataset by dataset. This is

particularly true of local authorities, many of which lack the urgencythat central government has shown. It was recently revealed, forinstance, that one in four councils in England are at least four monthsbehind in publicising information about their expenditure. 16

2.3 Context

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To confuse matters further, an increasingnumber of public services such asemployment support and educationare being run by voluntary and privateorganisations, which are not alwaysbound to release information about theiractivities. 17

This is turn has led to concerns over

privacy and the protection of sensitiveinformation. The very term data hasbecome synonymous with surreptitiousactivities, evoking images of WikiLeaks,lost USB sticks on trains and GCHQencroachment in the minutiae of our lives.

16 Evening Standard (2014) Councils fail on data publication [Article], 3rd February 2014.17 Deloitte (2011) Deloitte Analytics Insights on tap: Improving public services through data analytics.


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A poll by Ipsos MORI found thatclose to 60 per cent of people lackcondence in companies and publicbodies to keep their data secure. 18

This has been demonstrated mostrecently in the furore surrounding plansto collect and store data from GPssurgeries in one place, with 4 in 10 GPsthreatening to withhold their patientsdata for fear of its misuse. 19

Yet perhaps the biggest barrier torealising the potential of open data liesless in how it is supplied (and stored)and more in whether there is actuallydemand for it from users. To date the

biggest consumers of open data atleast in its most raw form have been journalists and tech experts. A studyby the National Audit Office in 2012reported that very few people look atthe data the government produces. 20

2.3 Context

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For example, they reported that pageviews for transparency data on theMinistry of Justice website accountedfor just 0.02 percent of overall traffic.

Part of the reason is because data isoften chucked onto these platforms inan unusable format. The COINs systemcreated in 2010 has been singled outas a particularly bad example of anunwieldy data storage system. But abroader problem is the low level ofawareness among the general publicabout what open data is and how it canbe useful. The same Ipsos MORI studyfound that two in three people dont feelinformed about what information public

services hold about them, and 74 percent dont know how to nd out. 21

18 Ipsos MORI (2012) Understanding Society: Evolving public services, evolving public opinion. London: Ipsos MORI.19 See Praities, N. (2014) Over 40% of GPs intend to opt themselves out of care.data scheme [article], 24th January 201420 National Audit Office (2012) Cross-government review: Implementing strategy. London: NAO21 Ipsos MORI (2012) Op cit.


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Time will tell whether such schemesare successful. However it is onlythrough experimentation and thetrialing of new initiatives that we canlearn how to make best use of opendata. Indeed, this is crucial given howquickly the technological landscape isexpected to change over the comingyears. New opportunities will emergethat mean the public sector mustcontinue to challenge and changeexisting ways of working.

What does the future hold? None of this of course is to deny the signicant impact that opendata has made on peoples lives. It is only in its infancy, and manyof the aforementioned drawbacks are likely to be ironed out overtime. Some of the most forward-thinking organisations and localauthorities have already taken steps to address these obstacles.Councils around Sheffield have decided to work together to

align their data collection and analysis activities; Open Glasgowis creating an open dashboard to create a personal live-timesnapshot of Glasgow for citizens and visitors; and the Open DataInstitute continues to run events and training sessions to supportopen data initiatives and understanding with a wider audience.

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We know, for instance, that the amount ofpublic sector data made available is likelyto continue to grow, but so too will thecreation of that data. The emergence ofthe Internet of Things (everyday productsconnected to the internet) means it willbe feasible to collect data in real time,as is increasingly the case in the US. SanFrancisco, for example, launched theSFPark app, which draws on data fromsensors in 7,000 metered car park spacesto show which are currently available .22 Another example is Wheres My SchoolBus?, an app that can be used by studentsand their parents in Boston to track thelocation of their bus in real time. 23

22 See http://sfpark.org/23 See http://schoolbus.bostonpublicschools.org/

2.4 Context


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We may also see more people trackingtheir own personal data, along thelines of the Quantied-Self Movementcurrently popular among many healthand tness enthusiasts. One of the mostprominent examples is Mappiness,an app developed by researchers atthe London School of Economics that

enables people to track their happinessand nd out when, where and withwhom they are most happy. 24

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The data collected is useful both to theuser and the research team. This mayprove a more innovative way for publicsector organisations to capture andpromote the use of data than relyingon existing datasets, some of which areyears out of date.

The digital services developed throughthe Make It Local Scotland programmealready show innovative uses of datacapture, storage and distribution thatmay be common place in years tocome. What follows is a description asto why and how these were developed,some of the challenges involved in theirrealisation and their perceived impact

and benets to date.

24 See http://www.mappiness.org.uk/

2.4 Context


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The project started with quite lowexpectations with some of the peoplein the team envisaging that they wouldonly get information about six or sevenparks uploaded onto the site for itslaunch. This was, in part, because quitea number had never done anythingsimilar before and they were unsurehow long some aspects might take.

Making It Happen A small project team came together from across the Councilled by its web manager and included the Parks Department;the Libraries division which provided heritage and contemporaryimages from their collections; a Customer Experience Managerwho tested the content with the local community; a SeniorCommunications Officer who was responsible for promotingthe service; an external developer who won the tender todevelop the site; and an agency, Eskimo, which was responsiblefor creating the sites design. The Council provided the variousofficers time in-kind but nobody was working on the project full-time and everyone had to juggle other responsibilities around it.

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The original timescale for the project six months from concept to deliverywas one of the greatest challengesmeaning that the group had to forma team and work out roles andresponsibilities rapidly.

3.1 Edinburgh Outdoors


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Having developed some designconcepts, the authority published theseonline and invited residents to give theirviews through questionnaires and focusgroup discussions. Quite a few parksin Edinburgh have friends groups andthe Council also went out and consultedwith some of these.

By the time Edinburgh Outdoorswas launched there were 143 parks and open spaces on the site withdescriptions of all the monumentscontained within them. The Council wasfortunate to have access to a collectionof old images of Edinburghs parks andso was able to include some of thesealongside contemporary ones and thisfeature proved very popular with users.

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The Council put an estimated 10,000 additional funding into the project primarilyfor app development but also for additionalmarketing of the site. Promotionalactivities included use of social mediaand publicising the app at events such asthe Royal Highland Show. However, theorganisers feel that the initiative couldhave beneted from a more sustainedmarketing campaign. The ongoing costsfor the service essentially support andmaintenance - is estimated to be around3,000 a year .


We have to get a quite diverse group ofpeople to work together over short timescales.They had to bond very quickly.Edinburgh Outdoors Project Lead


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Edinburgh Outdoors has also made the Council consider thepotential for an app which brings together a whole range ofinformation about the city, not just its parks.

Future development of the service The current aspiration is to build a larger platform forEdinburgh Outdoors which incorporates additional featuressuch as possibly having information for runners aboutpotential training routes through the citys parks and afeature for people who are in wheelchairs to nd accessibleroutes on at terrain. However, the organisers are keen toensure that the app doesnt become so busy that it appearsunwieldy or difficult to use.

Impact and Benets

There have been almost 46,000 individualpage views since the launch of EdinburghOutdoors around a quarter of which havebeen from mobile devices. There havebeen more than 1,000 Android and iPhonedownloads. Edinburgh Outdoors hasmore than 1,750 Twitter followers and itsFacebook page has almost 500 likes.

The project has been popular withboth residents and visitors enablingindividuals to get more out of the parksand thereby increasing their enjoyment ofthem. Teachers, for example, have foundEdinburgh Outdoors a valuable way toenhance their childrens experience ofthe citys parks by using the app to shareinformation with them and to use as astimulus for biodiversity learning projects.

Some of the staff of the Parks Departmentare now, as a result of the project, muchmore conversant with social media andare using it to promote activities availablein the citys open spaces. Tree surgeonsemployed by the Council have used theapp to communicate what they do andwhy and have found this useful to counter

misunderstandings about their work.


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Impact and Benets The project has been very effective

within the local authority to demonstratethe potential of open data. It has had asignicant inuence on the way that opendata has been viewed in the Council andthe opportunities that it presents. Thelocal authority now has a new ICT andDigital strategy, and has created a newpost, Digital Services Manager, whichincludes innovation and open data in the

job description. It is currently formulatingan open data strategy and plans to carryout a number of small demonstratorprojects which will be fairly easy to deliverand can show measurable benets. Withthis in mind, the Council is also looking atthe potential for working on projects with

local universities in which students willbe encouraged to mash up data sets andsee what can be created as a result. It isalso likely to run a series of hack events tostimulate and inspire usage of open data.

For me it was a case study that we could say and thisis what you can do so that when I am trying to makean argument for opening up data easily, I can say thatthese are the things people did using our data.Edinburgh Outdoors Project Lead

Edinburgh Outdoors was shortlisted fora Eurocities Award which showcasesoutstanding achievements by membercities in the delivery of local activitieswhich improve the quality of life for citizens.

The Council has been asked to speak at anumber of events and conferences about

the project and thereby raised its prole.The organisers believe that the projecthas also helped perceptions of the Councilby local digital developers and this mayfacilitate collaborations with Edinburghsdeveloper community in the future.

The source code for Edinburgh Outdoorshas already been taken for another projectinvolving the Edinburgh InternationalScience Festival. The festival organisersadded several new features, which havealso been folded back into the OpenSource code base.


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Tips from the organisers for others: Being able to cite how Edinburgh Outdoors

was meeting some of the local authoritysstrategic objectives was found to be usefulin getting buy-in from senior managers inthe Council for the concept.

You need something that people need touse, not just want to. If we could work outhow to get the bus routes for parks on theapp, we think that would increase usagebecause people are always using that app.Edinburgh Outdoors Project Lead

It is worthwhile considering if an app canincorporate a feature which users will ndespecially useful and which might drivetraffic to the site.


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Smart Journey is a joint projectbetween Aberdeen City Counciland Aberdeenshire Council. Thedigital agency which helped realisethe project was Swirrl IT withassistance from Lighthouse design.

Smart Journey is a mobile-friendly website toenable the community in Aberdeen City andneighbouring Aberdeenshire to share anddiscover up-to-date local travel information.It includes information on road conditions,

disruptions and current and planned roadworks - and also allows citizens to providetheir own live updates.

4.0 Smart Journey

19(http://smartjourney.co.uk/)


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Although there were various sourcesof travel information available, auser would have to go to a number ofdifferent places and so it was decidedto bring this information together intoa single service which would workeffectively on a mobile.

How it came about A signicant proportion of people commute fromAberdeenshire into the city every day, principally forwork but also for leisure and the Council found thata very signicant proportion of feedback on its socialmedia was about problems with roads and traffic.

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It was considered crucial that peopleshould be able to contribute to it byinforming other road users about anyproblems, tailbacks, accidents androadworks which they have encounteredor are currently experiencing. Theintention was also that the facility wouldprovide a source of information for thetwo local authorities to monitor problemsand where appropriate, take action.

4.1 Smart Journey


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The main challenges which theorganising team encountered weretechnical and creating the open datato drive the service from previouslyclosed data sets. The agency which wasselected for the scheme, Swirrl IT, wasable to overcome these difficulties andbrought valuable prior experience ofdelivering other linked data projects.

A lot of effort was put into publicisingthe service including the use of pressand radio promotions and adverts onthe nozzles of pumps at petrol stations.

This was quite successful in raisingawareness of Smart Journey but anongoing challenge has been encouragingpeople to put up their own travel reports.

4.3 Smart Journey

Weather became just another thing that disruptedtravel so we didnt see the need to have a sort ofweather portal mixed in with it but simply to reectwhat the road conditions were We thought abouttrying to integrate more data on public transportin terms of buses and trains, and that could stillgrow out of it at some point, but the scope had tobe manageable and deliverable.Smart Journey Project Lead


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Future development In the short term, the organisers intend to dosome more promotion of the service, particularlyto encourage users to send in their reports.One feature being considered is a deeper integrationof social media so that a Twitter user could, for

example, sign-in through Twitter and then whenreporting a problem would have this informationentered onto Smart Journey and also have ittweeted out simultaneously.

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Although it would be a fairly considerable undertaking,the organisers see the potential in having a Scotland-wideversion of the service.

Such a facility would mean that someone making a journeyfrom Aberdeen to Dundee would avoid having to visit fourseparate local authority travel portals. Aberdeen City Councilwelcomes interest from other local authorities which mightbe interested in collaborating on this venture.

4.2 Smart Journey


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Impact and benets Smart Journey has taken information which

was previously available and made it bothmore visible and more accessible. In 2013,there were 21,798 visits to Smart Journeyand 14,756 unique visitors. It has almost500 registered users and 1,122 reportshave been submitted.

The project brought two local authoritiestogether and though they had collaboratedon small initiatives in the past, this was amore signicant undertaking and has madethem consider how else they might worktogether in the future.

A roads engineer would put in what we call a trafficnotice to say that on Wednesday 2nd April somebody willbe digging up the A90 at this location and it will affectthese places, and give a description of it. That will allhave been done manually in Word documents and then itwould have been sent to the press as a news release, andit would have been sent to councillors whose wards are

affected and other community people.We scrapped that and wrote a simple system so that theygo into the system, they log on, it generates the pressrelease, it emails the councillors but it also updatesSmart Journey at the same time. Not a huge developmentbut that really made such a difference It meant thatinformation was owing better.Smart Journey Project Lead

4.2 Smart Journey

Smart Journey has enabled the localauthorities to automate a process(announcing road closures) whichpreviously had to be done manually.This means that information can now bereleased more rapidly and more efficientlyand with the user-generated content, theinformation is much richer and up to theminute as a result.


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Impact and benets There has been interest from other Councils in Scotland and the organisers also

believe that it has helped how the Council is perceived in the local community:

There is still a largely untapped opportunity for community groups to take relevantdata from Smart Journey and repurpose it for their local area. The project leadcites the example that just prior to the launch of Smart Journey, he got intoa conversation with a local digital developer who built a smartphone app forAberdeen City in his spare time which gives information about the locale and what

is happening in different parts of the city. The developer took the open data andrewrote it so that as soon someone puts in a report of problem into Smart Journeyit appears on the handsets of people in whose location it is happening.

Tips from the organisers for others

Having a project management methodologythrough which the organisation couldcontrol the project was crucial so that thescheme remained on time and on budget. It

was also important to be explicit about whatthe project deliverables will be.

I think if you are prepared to stick your neck out andtry things, if youre successful, then it brings positive

attention which then gives you other opportunitiesTheres a benet not just for me and the team but theCouncil as well in terms of showing that we can actuallydo something a bit more exciting and innovative.Smart Journey Project Lead

4.2 Smart Journey

Choosing the developer carefully andtaking steps to understand what they doand what they can deliver meant taking thetime to look at their track record, at theirrecommendations, and examples of otherwork they have done.


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The main routes in Glasgow get gritted from aroundSeptember until April each year. Glasgow Grittingis a website which offers live information on roadand pavement gritting services throughout the cityduring the autumn and winter period. The serviceshows which routes have been gritted, when a street

was last treated and gives information on prioritygritting routes using real-time data from GPS trackingequipment on gritting vehicles. It was developed byGlasgow City Council and IRISS (Institute for Researchand Innovation in Social Service).

5.0 Glasgow Gritting

26(http://gccgritting.iriss.org.uk/)


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The announcement went out duringwhat was a severe winter and sounsurprisingly gritting was a populartheme in the responses received.As the Council had access to data onroads which had been gritted fromthe 243 vehicles which go out anddo the gritting, it chose gritting asthe focus for the development ofa new digital service.


How it came aboutThe Council announced on its website and through its socialmedia channels that it was intending to release some of itsdata and invited suggestions from the public about whatsort of data they would like to see opened up. At the sametime, it put out a call for digital agencies to get in touch ifthey might be interested in partnering on the project this was a different procurement process for the localauthority which the Nesta grant made possible.


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Making it HappenThe project was led by the Councils CorporateServices team in collaboration with its Land andEnvironmental Services Division with input fromits internal marketing team. Consultations on theproject and what it aimed to achieve took place

through two of the local authoritys communitycouncils and demonstrated a demand for it.

Originally, the Council had hoped to show on a map on GlasgowGritting where the gritting lorry was in real time but for securityand other reasons this feature was not included. A link to Find mynearest was included on the site. This is a website through whicha resident can put in their street name or postcode and then ndtheir nearest schools, GP, parks, salt and grit bins etc.

The service was communicated through articles in local mediaincluding the City Councils own magazine which goes out to250,000 residents in the city. The Council also took out some print

and radio advertisements and publicised the Glasgow Gritting onits social media outlets (it has about 40,000 followers on Twitter) which proved to be the most effective marketing tool.


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Future DevelopmentThe site is moving from IRISSs servers to those ofGlasgow City Council. The local authority plans tocontinue to monitor usage of Glasgow Gritting andtest some new ways to market the service to thelocal community and gauge their reactions to it.

In 2013 Glasgow City Council won a24 million Future Cities competitionto showcase how it can grow its localeconomy and improve the lives of itscitizens by making the most of newtechnologies and by integrating andconnecting city systems.

The competition, managed and fundedby the governments innovation agency,

the Technology Strategy Board, sawGlasgow secure this funding in anopen competition against 30 other UKcities. Led by the Council in partnershipwith key public, private and academicorganisation including the University ofStrathclyde, its programme will be runover an 18 month period.

As part of Future Cities, the local authorityhas launched a portal, Glasgow Data(http://data.glasgow.gov.uk/about) , wheredata sets covering transport, education,environment and health are being madefreely available. Data sets recently madeavailable include ones on allotments, cycleroutes, rivers, household composition,hospital admissions, and air quality.

This year the authority also intends to openup its existing Freedom of Informationdata. The purpose of this is in part to bemore transparent but also the authorityhas found that a lot of the requests it getsare of a similar nature and making thisinformation readily available might avoidthis duplication.


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Impact and benets Unsurprisingly, the usage of the site varies

signicantly according to the weather. Atthe time of writing in January 2014, therehas been an unusually mild winter and sousage has been limited. Since the launch ofGlasgow Gritting it has had almost 10,000page views with about 6,000 user sessions.

One of the benets from the site has beena decrease in the number of telephonecalls from the public to the Council askingabout which streets have been gritted.Responding to such calls can be time-consuming and thereby costly.

Whilst the website was for the entire localcommunity, a particular beneciary hasbeen the Councils Home Helps. Glasgowhas some 4,000 Home Helps and quiteoften in the winter they are unable to get totheir clients to see them because the roadsare in such a bad condition. The Councilhas been able to use the site to show whichroads have been gritted so that the workerscan nd possible alternative routes.

Similar to most of the other Make it Localprojects, there was also a perception benetfor the Council:

Its not always apparent that a streethas been gritted when youre in ahouse. So people were phoning upour call centre to ask that question.The call centre operatives wouldnd that a really difficult questionto answer before the website camealong. They would have to phone the

depot and ask the supervisor if thestreet had been gritted. All they haveto do now is look on the map, put thepostcode in and youve got it there.

Glasgow Gritting Project Lead

I think it looks a little bit trendy asan organisation to do somethinglike that which is not normallyassociated with the Council, thatkind of idea innovation.

Glasgow Gritting Project Lead


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Tips from the organisers for others Having a fairly tight focus was found to be

particularly benecial for Glasgow Grittingand enabled it to be delivered close to theintended launch.

Working with a not-for-prot agencyon a project of this nature was usefulas they were exible and were ableto accommodate the challenges of aninnovative and dynamic scheme.

The scope creep on these things is incredible or can be. Ours was quite tightly focussed.We could have made it wider but we decidednot to. I would suggest if someone was lookingto do a similar project, pick something that isdo-able but also keep the scope fairly tight.Glasgow Gritting Project Lead


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Orkney has a large number of archaeology sites varyingfrom the world famous (and World Heritage inscribed)sites such as Maeshowe or Skara Brae, to spots whereonce a int was found, or an interesting stone ploughedup. Into Orkney brings together data about archaeologicalsites and monuments on the Orkney Islands, allowing

users to explore and learn about the Islands heritage ona phone friendly website.

6.0 Into Orkney

33(http://www.intoorkney.com/)

The interactive service also enablesusers to add data such as sound les ofplace-names, photographic records, andupdates on key monuments which are atrisk from coastal erosion.

It was developed by the ArchaeologyService of Orkney Islands Council inpartnership with the digital agency Coplaand the Royal Commission on the Ancient

and Historic Monuments in Scotlandwhich made its records freely availablefor the project.


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6.1 Into Orkney

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The organisers wanted to create a service for residents or visitors tothe Orkney Islands so that when they come across a historic placeor monument, they can search for it on their mobile phone and learnabout its history whilst they are still present at the site.

Orkney has a thousand miles of coast and about a third of itsarchaeological sites are located on it. Many are getting badly damagedby the sea and this represents a signicant loss of heritage. Theorganisers wanted to use Into Orkney to encourage people to reportany coastal erosion to specic sites that they are aware of as theCouncils capacity to monitor such a signicant number of sites oversuch a wide area is extremely limited.

They also wanted to give communities the opportunity to contributeto Orkneys historical records by providing a central place for them to

record their own photos and descriptions of sites and also to be ableto upload their own audio tags with the correct pronunciation of aplace name in Orcadian.

How it came aboutEvery known archaeological site in Scotland has anindividual number through which the sites locationand history can be sourced but this information wasnot readily accessible meaning that an individualwould have to go home, try and recall where he/she

was that day and then look it up on a map.


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6.2 Into Orkney

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Making it happenEach site included on Into Orkney has a link to Canmore which is an onlinedatabase of Scotlands buildings, archaeology and industry. The site combinesthis information with two different satellite images those of Google Earth andBing together with photos and also occasionally with YouTube video clips.

The site includes the facility for individuals to upload a sound le giving thepronunciation of a specic place-name. This was considered to be an importantfeature as the Orkney community is continuously changing, and understanding

the original meanings of place-names in the landscape relies upon understandingtheir traditional pronunciation.

To date, the site has been promoted primarily through word-of-mouth whichhas been found to be a powerful tool for getting information out to Orkneyresidents and reects the Islands strong sense of community. The organiserwent through the Councils procurement route to select a developer for thesite though she did nd this process quite time consuming. An Orkney agency,Copla, was chosen and, being locally-based, this had the advantage that theproject lead could visit them to talk through the design and discuss any issues.

I wanted a place-names project because place-names arevery important to people. The language here which is Norseis now changing. So just like the sea is eroding the archaeologysites, the immigration of the English language is eroding thelocal language. As every successive generation disappears,so does a bunch of place-names and the understanding ofthe place-names the way of pronouncing them has gone.Into Orkney Project Lead


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6.3 Into Orkney

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Future development of the siteThe organisers are currently developing ideas for trails linking up differentarchaeological sites. A Viking trail has already been created - 600 years ofOrkneys past is Norse - and there is an aspiration to develop a trail aroundplace-names and to provide one that is particularly accessible.

One of the things about growing old is that peoplebecome interested in their past and the fan base forthe past is often people who are ageing. So I wouldlike them to be able to rely on the Into Orkney websiteto give them the material material they need.Into Orkney Project Lead

Impact and Benets

Into Orkney provides individuals with theopportunity to learn about the history ofthe sites they come across, see satellite

images and photos of the area and link to theCanmore database for further information.The number of unique visitors to the websitehas been gradually increasing with 92 visitingit in October 2013, 105 in November, 107 inDecember and 137 in January 2014.

There are now an estimated 3,500 monumentsincluded on the Into Orkney site. Based on thesites success, the organisers were given a

10,000 development grant from the localauthority to develop a Viking Trail.

For anyone considering developing land inOrkney, they can now look online and see ifthere is any archaeology in the area where

they propose to develop, what archaeologistssay about it and, if necessary, consider how thedevelopment could be better designed to t inwith the local landscape.

Tips from the organisers for others

Bringing the various parties on board at anearly stage to help them input into the schemeand providing opportunities for peer reviews

of the design early on helped facilitate theservices development.


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For a relatively modest investment Make It LocalScotland has helped develop useful new digitalservices for local communities in a very shortspace of time. The ongoing costs of the schemesare small - typically around 1,000 - and theservices are likely to continue to expand andgrow as they incorporate new aspects.

Conclusion

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None of the project leads envisaged that their service would havehappened without the impetus from the Nesta award and this illustrateshow challenge prizes can be a catalyst for innovation. What Make It LocalScotland has also shown has been the value in providing individualsworking in local government with the space and permission to develop newservices in a low-risk way, as this can unleash talent and stimulate cost-effective ways of delivering digital services. At a time of signicant cuts tolocal government such innovations are important.

There are clearly practical lessons that can be learnt from these schemesfor other local authorities and organisations looking to emulate the ideas ordevelop others around the use of open data sets. These include making surethat the data required for the service is actually available and is in a usableformat and ensuring the service is marketed well and that this promotion

is sustained well beyond the launch. What seems to have been an effectiveroute for publicity has been using the local authoritys existing media and,where possible, incorporating a feature in the app which a user would ndinvaluable, not just interesting.

All the projects mentioned the tight timeframe to deliver in and ideally wouldhave liked a bit longer to develop their concepts. However, it does seem thata short timescale gave the projects momentum and enabled some of themto be more focused, agile and realistic in what they could deliver; whereas alonger time-frame might not have encouraged this.


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Conclusion

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People thought they could do itbetter, in a different way, but giventhe timescales we couldnt do that,we just had to move forward.Project Lead

Surprisingly few of the project leads had worked with digital developersbefore and some were almost learning as they went along, yet this didnot act as signicant a challenge as might be assumed. This seems theresult of having selected developers who were:

Local Able to demonstrate relevant previous

experience through the delivery ofsimilar projects

Flexible

Had the ability to demystify technology


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Conclusion

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Even when an authority is committed to making data setsavailable, there is often a lack of skills and a shortage of trainedstaff who can analyse that data. The UKs Sector Skills Councilfor Business and IT estimates that demand for data crunchingstaff will rise by as much as 18 percent a year, compared to 2.5percent for general ICT staff. 25 Indeed, three out of every verms currently report difficulties in nding data talent. 26 Theresult is that many data analyst roles in the public sector arebeing lled by people who learn on the job rather than by fullytrained staff. 27

In the case of two of the participating local authorities, there was some initialinternal doubt or resistance to the schemes. The project funding from Nesta wasbenecial in this respect as it gave the endorsement of an outside body willing toinvest to make the ideas happen. The resistance was overcome through gainingsenior level buy-in or simply by just pushing ahead with the scheme regardless:

We had a snowball which was already travelling downthe hill at some speed and wed given commitmentsto doing it, so it was difficult to give any resistance tosomething that was already moving. We did get some

moaning that we should have involved them earlier,but this was a way of showing that we couldnt stopand they just had to get behind itProject Lead

25 E-skills UK (2013) Big Data Analytics: An assessment of demand for labour and skills, 2012-2017 .25 Ibid.26 Shakespeare, S. (2013) Shakespeare Review: An independent review of public sector information.


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Conclusion

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Indeed, some of the challenges which the projects went on toface are ones where perhaps discussions with other localauthorities who had already done something similar might havehelped them avoid or overcome earlier. Nesta is now embarkingon a new Open Data Scotland project in partnership with localauthorities in Scotland and Europe.

We showed that you could build somethingwith our data, something different andpeople didnt know they could do that

It has given people a very fresh outlookon what you can do with data.Project Lead

Perhaps the greatest impact of Make It Local Scotland may not be the projects it directly delivered but thosethat are now being inspired as a result of undertakingthe pilot schemes.

In most cases the projects built condence withinthe local authority around open data, demonstratedwhat could be achieved from opening up data setsand acted as trail blazers for larger and more

ambitious schemes.


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Documents

Make It Local Scotland