Birmingham Civic Dashboard

Councils deal with a huge amount of requests, feedback and comments from local residents, reporting everything from graffiti to broken lifts as well as requests for waste removal or information on registering a new baby. This information enables the council to act on issues, but it also has the potential to tell a story about an area.

Birmingham Civic Dashboard aims to show what people in Birmingham are contacting Birmingham City Council about through visualising contact centre data. Over time this dashboard shows stories about the city as well as opening up the data for others to use.

The Idea

The idea was born from a desire to show council activity and engagement with local citizens, creating a window on the city. Dashboards have been used in business intelligence for years, allowing managers to see activity logs and assess performance. Mudlark, a cross platform production company, is interested in ways to present data, and in particular in how to do that at a city level. Their game, Chromaroma, enables people to play at traveling across London and utilises data from Oyster card use to make beautiful visualisations of the journey:

(source: flickr.com)

The dashboard will allow people to view previously unavailable records of requests for services from the council. You will not be able to identify people from the data but you will be able to see the place the comment or complaint refers to. Over time you’ll be able to see if there are themes or issues which emerge.

Designing around sample data, taken on the 9th December, highlights:

• Two enquiries about a public emergency
• Nine enquiries relating to odour
• Four notifications of death (council tax)
• One request for information on the nearest public toilet

Human stories emerge from the data. Who wants to know where the nearest public toilet is, and does this mean better signage is needed in that area? Where are the problems with odour and what kind of odours are they?! The data can provide a snapshot of what is happening from the total volume and frequency of enquiries to the fine detail of the events.  Defining the data and presenting the vast amount of information back to end users is the first design task. Scale it too big and the stories get lost in the complexity of the data, too small and you’re left with vignettes that don’t tell the story of a city.

Designing the service and the challenges involved

Why would you want to see council activity?

The most common reasons are to see how a council is performing, and what the main issues are at any given time. This is useful as a reporting tool for both internal and external audiences. But it’s also potentially useful to help allocate council resources to tackle problems and to monitor how many people are contacting the council about the same issues. Is it worth escalating a problem that many people have contacted the council about?

There have been a number of issues in the design of the service and in particular in understanding and interpreting the data.  Enquiries received by the contact centre are categorised by location and type, of which there are four levels:

• Directorate
• Section within that Directorate
• Category of Request
• Specific type of request

The system showing  a directorate such as Chief Executive wasn’t helpful as information on a dashboard, so the challenge was to take council language (jargon) which had a specific context within the contact centre system and put it into plain English.

Datasets that cover an entire organisation are prone to change too. If an activity moves to a new directorate or a new type of activity needs to be captured, the application won’t automatically know this. Flexibility in the structure of the civic dashboard to allow for future change has to be built in.

Lastly, the visual design of the dashboard has borrowed from established patterns (for example, timelines and pie charts) but also tried to make this an engaging view, borrowing from Mudlark’s other work and their interest in science fiction in order to convey power in the viewer.

The alpha release of Birmingham Civic Dashboard is now live to a test audience (and will be available publicly in the near future). The data used is taken from the contact centre database and includes all contact to the council through the website, email, visits and phone calls.

Other views include a breakdown of contacts by type, allowing people to see at-a-glance what Birmingham residents are concerned about and what the council is having to deal with.

Next steps

The proof of concept service is now in an internal alpha release. Feedback on the project will determine whether it is taken on and developed into a more central part of the council web presence.

As part of the project the Birmingham contact centre data will be available for re-use.