A talk given to the Aylesbury Vale District Council Briefing Group on 27 Sept 2016.

1. Open Data…
…as an enabler of engaged citizens
@andypowe11

2. Preamble…
• Speaking primarily as a lightly engaged citizen of B&NES
• Brief introduction to Bath:Hacked
• Based on my experiences of consuming car-parking data…
• …and building services on the AWS IoT platform
Credit: much of the material about
Bath:Hacked is cribbed from Leigh
Dodds (Director at Bath:Hacked) and
Jon Poole (Research and Intelligence
Manager at B&NES Council)

3. Bath:Hacked
• Community Interest Company
“a joint council/community initiative that aims to put open data and
smart thinking at the heart of the city. Our primary mission is to
bring bright people and quality data together to do useful things for
the community”
• City data store
• Regular hack events
https://www.bathhacked.org/

4. Why does Bath:Hacked exist?
• To create a “genuinely civic data infrastructure” – Jon Poole
• Civic
/ˈsɪvɪk/
adjective - relating to the duties or activities of people in
relation to their town, city, or local area

5. Bath:Hacked philosophy (my version)
1. facilitating active citizen engagement with the council
(individuals, community groups, academia, businesses)
2. encouraging demand-led initiatives leading to
improvements in data quality
3. improving citizen data literacy and related IT skills
4. supporting an eco-system of both free and commercial
services at low cost to the council

6. What?

7. https://www.bathhacked.org/

16. Car-park data flow
AWS IoT
Platform
AWS
DynamoDB
Car-park
barriers

17. Car-park data flow (reality)
AWS IoT
Platform
AWS
DynamoDB
Car-park
barriers
Bath:Hacked
data store

20. How?

21. Data store

26. And the results
• Plenty of websites / mobile sites
• Lots of map-driven activity
• Some surfacing of content thru Twitter
• And in the future…
• Mobile phone apps
• ChatBots
• Amazon Echo

27. Summary
• Data coupled with community expertise appears successful
• Building a community takes time
• Similar approach being adopted by Bristol is Open
• But… some difficult questions remain
• How many citizens are really engaged? How do we move beyond
the ‘geeks’?
• What ensures the longevity of that engagement?
• Who is best placed to offer long-running services?
• Is this the best model to ensure high-quality data?

28. Questions?