This weekend we went along to the Talk About Local un-conference in Stoke (a mere six hours away) to talk to others doing hyper-local news about the highs and lows of running sites like this.
While there we met up with an excellent fellow called @CountCulture.
He’s been building a system to make local councils around the UK more open and accessible to all. It’s called OpenlyLocal and provides information about all of the current councillors and committees
Beside giving him a big old pat on the back for the whole project, we urged him to get the Isle of Wight Council plugged into the system.
Although the IWC Website is better than many local authority sites, it still takes a number of clicks to find out who the councillors are and the name and make up of the committees they’re on.
Talk about fast work!
We were amazed to hear from CountCulture today that he’d got the first part of the Isle of Wight Council’s information on it already.
This means that with OpenlyLocal covering it, all it takes now to find out who is on who is on what committee, eg Overview and Scrutiny Committee, or which committees each councillor is on eg Chris Welsford or Susan Scoccia, is a limited number of clicks.
It’s currently partially done with the Councillors, Council Committees and Ward names online, to be followed by more.
PsycheMedia’s previous work: Mapping IWC
Back in January this year Island-resident @Psychemedia did some excellent work on the foundations in this area.
Once the data had been extracted visual maps of the IWC committee membership were built. These could be easily reordered by the Committee or Councillor name simply by dragging the tab at the top.
Open
We love the idea of information becoming more open and will do our best to bring development of this kind to your attention when we can.
We’re not alone in this. Both Labour and the Conservatives are also announcing and making moves to opening up government data, so things should get more exciting over the next few years.
What kind of data that is held by the local authority or government would you like to see be made available?
