New year, new data (amongst other things!)
Welcome to the first post of 2016! And a slightly belated Happy New Year to you all. I hope 2016 has been kind to you so far and you’ve all been getting your thinking caps on for DATA Play 2 on 4 and 5 March!
DATA Play 2
Our follow up to the first DATA Play has officially been scheduled for the 4 and 5 March at the Red House (School of Creative Arts), Millbay. It’s looking like it’s going to be another great event, this time over two days! Come to one or come to both, it will be great to see you all! We’re getting the young folk involved on the Friday, so there’s going to be something to prove for you grown ups! Plus, we’ve a pot of £6,000 to distribute among the three ideas we think have the most potential, to take the ideas forwards! So this time, there will be a real opportunity to get designing and building with our data.
Make sure to follow our twitter @plymccplanning #DATAPlay or email DATAPlay@plymouth.gov.uk for details or to let us know you’re coming!
ODI training
We’re currently organising the ODI training as a thank you for coming to the first DATA Play day, we hope to get this fixed as soon as possible with the help of our friends at ThinqTanq and @ODIDevon. We’ll email you details as soon as we can.
If you wish to join the mailing list, please send us a message to DATAPlay@plymouth.gov.uk.
ODI Devon Forum
We recently attended the ODI Devon forum at the ThinqTanq in Plymouth. These events are a great opportunity to get together with other dataheads to discuss everything that’s going on in the world of open data. Most importantly they’re always good fun! The last meet up included a game of the ODI’s new open data board game; still in its infancy and including a board that looked suspiciously like it had come out of a printer, it was great fun. The gang at ODI HQ had asked us to have a play through and submit any feedback, which as you can probably guess with a bunch of data nerds, we did! The objective focusses on opening up data in order to build apps, the result of which increase the health of the world. Unfortunately event cards crop up, pushing the health back down, so it’s a case of working cooperatively to save the world! If you wish to come along to the next meet, everyone’s welcome.
New data
We’ve just added some new data for all to use, including public rights of way in the city and Plymouth City Council owned land. We think this could be really useful in terms of customers contacting the Council wanting to know exactly what land the Council own. An app or webpage showing this could save people time and money in contacting the Council through phone or in town when they could easily look online. And believe me, the Council get asked about land ownership a lot!
Another dataset that will be released before DATA Play 2 will be the parking zones throughout Plymouth. This is something that even long term residents haven’t got to grips with (boss included!!), as it’s never been publicly available in an easy to access way. Possible app idea anyone?
Keep checking the DATA Place Plymouth for new datasets!
That’s all for now, let us know of any data you find around the city, we’re always grateful for more… and don’t forget the 4 and 5 March!
Happy playing!
3 February 2016