Make It Local Showcase Event

Date: 14.04.2011 11:30 - 16:00

Location: NESTA, 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE

An exciting day of events to explore the potential of open data.

NESTA's Make it Local programme aims to show how local authorities can work with digital agencies and developers to unlock their data and provide really useful web-based services for their citizens.

Video - Will Perrin on how to make better use of open data:

The Make It Local projects

The event featured the four projects involved in the programme: 

• Ben Unsworth, London Borough of Sutton and their Bookshare project. 
• Simon Whitehouse, Birmingham Digital and Matt Watkins, Mudlark talking about the Birmingham Civic Dashboard,
• Diane Sims, Kirklees Council and Andrew Wilson, Thumbprint co-operative talking about Who owns my neighbourhood,
• Ben Goodson, Barnet Council & Dave Whiteland, mySociety talking about FixYourStreet

Video:

Panel discussion

We also held a panel discussion featuring Eugene Tsyrklevich from Parkopedia, Natasha Innocent from Race Online and Carole Gayle from  London Borough of Redbridge, discussing the importance of data and what can be achieved. James Boardwell from Rattle Research then presented the 'Top 5 things we learnt from Make it Local'.

Video:

Rewired State hack session

To wrap up the day we teamed up with Rewired State and held a hack session involving 6 developers and a bunch of open data.

More info on some of the apps:

Neontribe created 'Redfoir' a hack using data on freedom of information requests: 

Dave Addey created 'My Commute', a travel planning web site for your daily commute to work: 

@Premasagar and @Symroe created 'Local Business?' - a data hack that allows users to see what local businesses (or businesses further afield) a council is using and employing.

View the agenda (PDF 90Kb)