I gave a lightning talk at the National Digital Forum in November 2017. This _isn’t_ my talk. Because of time restrictions, I couldn’t make quite these points and still illustrate them, as I did, from our Gisborne District Council project. But here’s my first draft :)

As we’ve heard many governments, businesses and other organisations say, better data drives better decision making. And you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Time and time again, though, I’ve seen this go awry.

Data isn’t just looking at the Google Analytics for your site or service.

It isn’t just talking to a group of your colleagues and mates.

It isn’t just preaching the wonders of your product or service to the already converted.

Especially not if one works in government.

Because the people for whom government provides products and services aren’t customers.

They don’t have a choice in having to interact with you, generally. They need what you’re providing, or are required to do what you ask, and if they’re unhappy with your product or service, they can’t go to a competing entity (without leaving the country).

It means that government can’t just focus on one set of segments, and leave others behind. Well, it shouldn’t.

[Sidenote: the three paragraphs above are the subject of a much longer rant of mine, which I fully intend to write down soon (I’ve been saying this for years now).]

We live in a democracy, and need to treat people well. Especially in our new, kinder New Zealand.

So, how best to go about this?

It’s an ongoing and complex question, and one that our government — through initiatives like Lab+ — and others are working on.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned through my work with GovWorks, and events like GovHack — the Southern Hemisphere’s largest open data / open government hackathon.

1. Bring people together

People from all walks of life — the old, young, digital connected and unconnected. People from tech, from NGOs, from design, from art, and of course from local government.

This allows them to get to know each other’s possibilities and constraints better, to learn from each other, and to get more comfortable collaborating.

2. Provide a safe space for them to air their thoughts, and hear others’

It’s just as, or more, important to listen to the quiet voices in the room, as to the loud. Make sure minority groups are not only represented, but have a chance to share their views.

We all have different time commitments, and different comfort levels sharing our thoughts. Be kind, and thoughtful.

3. Learn by doing

When we train people in new skills and new ways to think — for example, our work training people in central and local government in modern design thinking and entrepreneurship paradigms — we work through a real challenge they face with them. We don’t stand and talk at them for hours. And we don’t work on hypothetical problems with them.

4. Start small and iterate

Figure out what a simple prototype product or service looks like. Test it out, with real people, learn from it and work to improve it.

And feel OK with leaving it behind if necessary! Experiments are vital, and there’s no shame in one failing. One can learn heaps from why.

5. Keep. Talking. With. People.

Something that turns people off more than just about anything? Seeing their time and effort and thoughts disappear into a black decision-making box, never to be heard from again.

If you’ve made a decision, explain clearly why. Be open to more feedback. Keep telling people what you’re doing, and soliciting their thoughts.

Be OK with showing vulnerability — that way, you’ve a better hope that they’ll stay involved.

And why does that matter?

Better services. Better products. Better policy.

Better decisions through better interactions was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I spoke at DrupalSouth 2017. Here are my speech notes (there’ll be a video of it too in near future, I hear. Eep!).

As my talk title suggests, the tech industry — including open source — have a strong role to play in contributing to a stronger, kinder, more resilient NZ.

I’m going to cover open data, open government, open source — but only briefly, as you’re already experts! — and how it all ties together into something called “civic tech”.

And how all of these could and can have an immeasurably positive impact on our communities, our whanau, and as a result, ourselves.

Open say what now?

I reckon that strong, shared definitions of any term are amazingly useful when talking about it.

So first up, it’s probably useful to make sure we’re all on the same page with what I mean when I talk about open data.

For the purposes of this talk, we can define open data as any data that’s publicly available, and on an ongoing basis.

And “publicly-available” doesn’t mean for a short period of time only. It doesn’t mean for a select group of people. Or with barriers to entry like being charged to access it.

It means, quite literally, publicly available. To anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Of course, this definition also includes shoddily-made PDFs of council minutes, for example, so the data may be publicly available, but that doesn’t mean it’s hugely accessible, or even terribly useful for many use-cases (not without an amount of resource which acts in itself as a barrier to entry).

And it’s not necessarily live data. To put it another way — it’s static, and while it’s still useful to look for past trends and patterns, it’s not useful for any real-time application. It also, very easily, becomes out of date. And one doesn’t necessarily know when that happens.

One way to counter this, of course, is to make it machine readable. This can be done by the organisation who’s releasing the data, or by members of the public or other organisations. To use our earlier example of Council minutes, someone might take those shoddy (and often rather buried) PDFs and turn attendance records trapped in them into a spreadsheet, for easier analysis.

An even better thing to do would be to also release the data in the form of an API. An open API — that is, one that’s publicly available. With a bit of luck, there’d also be some accompanying documentation about how to use the API, making it nicely accessible, too.

This allows people to analyse and pipe the information into just about any form they choose, from maps to apps. Not only is the data the most up-to-date available, but, as we know, it can be used to make realtime, living resources.

I know the devs I, er, know far prefer an API to being handed an Excel spreadsheet (which may or may not have become corrupted along the line, too).

I hear a lot of puzzlement from people about why on earth one should give away data. After all, data leads to information, which leads to knowledge.

And knowledge is power, right?

Open data has huge social value

I’ll answer that question from a lens focussing on open data’s social value. If you’re interested in its commercial value, feel free to contact me afterwards! Because there’s definite commercial value to it, too :)

There’s a strong case to be made that data that’s generated by publicly-funded institutions — eg government — should be available to the public who paid for it. Of course, I’m not talking about all data, and certainly not in raw form. We must be very careful around privacy, and not victimising or revictimising people.

But there’s plenty of data that can and should be shared. And a tonne of organisations, and research, backing up that open government data is a powerful thing.

It enables ordinary citizens to understand better what’s going on in their societies, and make more informed choices about the decisions they, and their elected officials, make.

It enables people to push for change — or the status quo — based on evidence, not anecdote, opinion or emotion. Although we know that emotion is hugely important in making decisions.

It builds higher levels of digital literacy — since people need to understand the basics (or know people who do) in order to use the data, they have a stronger incentive to learn about it.

It builds more transparent government and power structures, enabling people to hold their governments to account (sometimes to the horror of said governments, which is great).

And it gets people engaged. Fewer black boxes into which data disappears, never to reappear, means a less cynical and disengaged society. And the more people are engaged in our society, the better. After all, we live in a democracy!

And we get to interrogate our gods.

Talking of which, open government…

Let’s segue into open government, then. I’m not suggesting they’re our gods, but they do have a powerful effect on our lives!

Across the world, more and more governments are turning to the principles of open government as they look for how to stay relevant, do more with less, and be more responsive.

Open govt, as the quotation says, means that people living in a country have the right to access information about what the government is doing — often in the form of open data. Of course, exactly what people can access, and how, differs hugely between countries, but the principles of open government — transparency and accountability, participation and engagement — remain the same.

It’s simple: open governments make for better democracies.

It enables the public to better oversee their government’s activities.

It empowers the people in that country to be more informed, and potentially more engaged.

And it helps push governments to be more accountable, effective and responsive.

One of the major international open government initiatives is the Open Government Partnership, or OGP.

It was founded in 2011, to “provide an international platform for domestic reformers committed to making their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens.” (OGP)

As you see, the OGP people over here have some noble aims:

“New Zealand’s action plan provides opportunities for us to do even better in the areas of:

• improving public service delivery
• increasing the transparency and accountability of government
• encouraging greater public engagement
• fostering new ways for citizens and governments to work together to solve common problems.”

With 7 commitments:

• open budget
• improving official information practices
• improving open data access and principles
• tracking progress and outcomes of open government data release
• ongoing engagement with the OGP
• improving access to legislation
• improving policy practices.

We’re watching closely to see how the involved agencies do — so can you :)

The third tier: open source software

I’m not going to go into much detail here, as this is an open source conference! But I did want to bring into the room 3 of the most important characteristics (I think) of open source software:

• it’s freely shared
• it’s collaborative in nature, and has “practices and norms for effective remote communication and collaboration”
• and it enables faster, more powerful innovation.

While each of the opens — open data, open government and open source software — can and often are seen as separate things, I believe there’s huge potential for overlap.

Civic tech lies at the intersection of the opens

One of the best of these is in a relatively new movement called “civic technology”.

Civic tech means more than just hacking for social good. It’s about hacking civic issues, and finding ways to directly help people.

It comes in three main flavours:

• citizen-to-citizen — improves citizen mobilisation and connection (resist movements in US)
• citizen-to-government — improves quality and frequency of interaction between government and citizenry (FYI.org.nz)
• government-to-government (govtech) — improves govt service delivery (Lab+).

I’m going to tell you about three of my favourite civic tech stories — two here, and one overseas — and all showing how hugely open source can contribute, or be contributed to. Of course, there are hundreds, spanning the entire globe, from Kenya to the Netherlands, Toronto to Taiwan, Mexico to, well, New Zealand :)

Civic tech in the wild: eq.org.nz

As many of us remember clearly, Christchurch was rocked by a series of major earthquakes in 2010 and 2011.

While the 2010 earthquake caused damage, nobody was killed. In 2011, however, when our restless land heaved again, 185 people were killed and there was even more structural damage caused to a city already battling.

Imagine having skills in open source coding and open data — as many of you do — and wondering how best to help the people of Christchurch?

That’s exactly what the NZ tech community did — they took the initiative stepped in to help :)

Their solution was elegant, and inspired. They set up a local instance of the open source disaster response platform Ushahidi — initially developed in Kenya to monitor election violence. Ushahidi means “testimony” in Swahili.

Combining that with open data, and crowdsourced information, they were able to spin up eq.org.nz within a matter of hours, helping Christchurch people to contribute to and find out, on a map, what was going on in their city, how to navigate it, and where to access essential goods and services.

“Contributors could enter information on a website form, or via email, SMS code, or Twitter with hashtags #eqnz or #helpme for emergency requests.” (ODI)

The web app attracted 70,000 visits in the first couple days after the quake, with 779 reports in 781 different locations. It was shut down 3 weeks later, once power and normal comms channels were fully restored.

Of course, eq.org.nz was a huge community effort — it brought together the private and public sectors as well as civil society :)

Other related initiatives included “a series of geographic information system (GIS) data sharing agreements between agencies that enabled the successful provision of mapping services throughout the response and recovery;

• “websites using open property data that enabled citizens to check the status of their homes and land, and generated millions of hits within hours of release;
• “a construction intention viewer built using open data and open source tools that saved NZ$4 million in construction costs within its first year of use;
• “and a crowdsourced competition for school children that generated over 18,000 new building footprints for open property databases at a cost of $0.02 per footprint.” (ODI)

It’s a potent example of how open source knowledge — especially when combined with open data! — can contribute enormously in times of crisis: faster, using fewer (often costly) resources, and helping reduce the load on already overstretched services.

[Side note: check out CEISMIC, which is built on Drupal! It’s “a comprehensive digital archive of video, audio, documents and images related to the Canterbury Earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. It’s not just about the shaking, but also about the struggles, the chaos and the creativity that followed”.]

Civic tech in the wild: GovHack NZ

The second example I’d like to mention is GovHack.

For those of you who are — please bear with me a couple of minutes. For those of you who aren’t…it’s the southern hemisphere’s largest open data / open government hackathon (I’m presuming you all know what a hackathon is :P).

Do you see issues in your community that you’d love to see solved, or at least tackled? Stuff that’s awesome you’d like to see more of? Do you like having a bit of a play sometimes and building something interesting which helps people? GovHack’s probably for you, then :)

It started as a small civic hacking slash protest project in Australia in 2009. People there were…irritated…that some of them were being threatened with legal action, BY government departments, for using public government data.

It’s grown somewhat since then; both the public and private sector are involved with it and, in some cases, actively on board!

In 2015, GovHack came to NZ as well. And every year it gets bigger, both here and in Aussie.

This year, it took place in 8 locations across NZ, and a further 27 across Australia. Hundreds of people in NZ — and thousands in total — came together to use open government data to design, prototype and build solutions to civic issues they saw around them.

The range was huge — from apps addressing the housing crises and liveability, to access to swimmable water, to matching volunteers with charities, to industry diversity and concentration across NZ, and a bunch more!

And because we believe that open is best, any code produced by the projects must also be open source. Check it out — you can go see the project descriptions, datasets used and code for yourself!

Civic tech in the wild: g0v & vTaiwan

Finally, let’s move to Taiwan.

We’re all familiar with open source communities and how they work :) Now, can you imagine a community group based on those principles? On flat (or no) hierarchies? On staying agile, and being collaborative? On building together?

That’s g0v — East Asia’s largest civic hacker collective.

Founded in 2012, it really took off in 2014, however, during the sunflower movement — a student movement which occupied the Taiwanese parliament’s surroundings during 23 days. The sunflower movement’s an amazing example of an Occupy movement which created lasting, positive change.

And g0v was a huge part of it, and continues to make significant contributions to improving Taiwan’s civic life and democracy.

Their aim, as they say, is to fork government . To do that, they’re constantly creating new open source tools for things like visualising budgets, and thinking of ways to build a more participatory democracy — check out the link to see the full range!

And ever since the sunflower movement, g0v and other open source community members — in collaboration with the Taiwanese government — been developing a new “conglomeration of civic technologies (like the open source

It’s called vTaiwan, and uses a mixture on online and in person tools to gather people’s feelings on issues, and give them real power when it comes to making policy.

“…on July 26 (2016), Taiwan’s new premier declared in a cross-ministry meeting that “all substantial national issues should go through a vTaiwan-like process.” (Civicist)

vTaiwan is an experiment, of course, and the initiative is having difficulty scaling up to a nationwide level. But there are powerful lessons we can learn, nonetheless, from both g0v and vTaiwan.

As you can hopefully see from just these three small examples, there is huge potential for those of us in the open source community to contribute to our society, even outside of the open source community itself!

Open drives progress

We can work in government, with government, and even around government on a host of other matters. And we can influence both the public and private sector to do better :)

Open drives progress. It can build amazing things.

I believe that de-escalating scarcity as a source of power — encouraging open data, open government and open source — can only be a good thing.

As we know with open source software, the power should be in what one DOES with it, not keeping it in a proverbial locked safe.

There are umpteen case studies throughout history of the enormous value generated when information is shared, remixed and built upon. Civilisation itself is one of them.

So is the internet.

Open source code — and open source ideals, known and spread by open source communities! — have a huge part to play in making more open societies.

More transparent. More free. More informed. More engaged. More truly powerful.

Do we want stronger New Zealand, that looks after her people and her environments, and that’s envied around the world for her kindness and resilience?

We can help build her.

We can help build a better world.

As open source people, we have the keys.

And we can, if we choose, open the door :)

— — —

See other blog posts we’ve written here about civic tech.

Check out my #openX flipboard, into which I save some of the stuff I see about #opendata, #opengov and #civictech, and a bit of #opensource.

— — —

My slides!

Towards a more open NZ was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Justine Pepperell (idea and words) and aimee whitcroft (words and mapping)

Archives NZ’s open dataset on the 1893 Suffragettes Petition, women in politics, the pending general election, and the National Library’s exhibition He Tohu, “He whakapapa kōrero, he whenua kura [Talking about our past to create a better future]” inspired us to do a little data mashup.

We’ve mapped two open datasets that show the past and the present coming together on election day.

Check out our map to see:

• where you can vote on election day — Saturday 23 September 2017
• some of the names of those who signed the Suffragettes Petition in 1893, leading to New Zealand becoming the first country in the world to award women the right to vote.

Find out if you are related to one of the 20,0000 suffragettes who signed the petition

For more information about the datasets we used, click on “more details” on the left hand side of the map.

Datasets

• Advanced voting places for the 2017 General Elections*, sourced from www.elections.org.nz/news-media/resources-2017-general-election/voting-place-and-advance-voting-place-coordinates.
• Voting places for the 2017 General Elections*, sourced from www.elections.org.nz/news-media/resources-2017-general-election/voting-place-and-advance-voting-place-coordinates.
• A sample of names** from the main suffrage petition submitted to Parliament in 1893 . The full dataset is available at nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/womens-suffrage/petition. Let us know if you’d like someone added to the map!
• UPDATE: if you wanna play with the dataset itself, you can download it (as a .csv file) at catalogue.data.govt.nz/dataset/1893-womens-suffrage-petition :)

* The general elections voting places published information is subject to change, is not the authoritative version. Authoritative information can be found at http://apps.apac.tomtom.com/vote2017/.

• * The sample was generated by taking a single name from each unique location in the dataset. It shows the spread of geographic locations (towns/cities), but it gives no indication of how many people signed the petition in each location.

Justine is the powerhouse behind GovHack NZ’s social media presence on Twitter and Facebook (GovHack NZ and GovHack Wellington). Hit her up if she can help you with yours!

aimee is one of the national leads for GovHack NZ, along with Nick Williamson, her co-founder for GovWorks NZ (for which this blog is home).

Voting then and now: 1893 and 2017 was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Open data — ie publicly available and accessible data — has as many benefits as there are potential uses and users. More so, in fact — it’s a perfect example of the network effect, and how each additional node adds exponentially to the power of the whole.

And it benefits us all.

Open data and communities

Members of the public can use open data to empower themselves or build products and services for their community. It ties communities together, as well as bumping the public, private, civil and even diplomatic sectors together.

Open data and business

Entrepreneurs and established businesses can build and expand with it. Influence both their customers and their competitors, and the general state of play.

One just needs to look at the phenomenal success of the open source software movement to see that publicly-available, and without cost, can be the backbone for tremendous productivity and innovation.

[I won’t go too much more into this, having written about it quite extensively in a recent blog post on how open data fuels innovation.]

Open data and government

In government, open data can be used for transparency and accountability.

Of course, it can also be used as a smoke screen, if government just opens the datasets they want to open. But even then, the more open data there is, the more we can see the holes, and demand what’s ours.

Participatory budgeting — where community members decide how to spend part of a public budget — is an important example of the value of open data.

Open data and prioritisation

And yes, I know that opening data can be terrifying. It can also consume resources which, on the face of it, could be better used elsewhere — in answer to which I’d like to point to the far higher costs of OIA and LGOIMA requests which could have been avoided with an open-by-default approach.

The temptation is to ask people “what should we open up, and especially, what should we open up first/prioritise?”.

I don’t believe that’s the right approach, though. We don’t know what’s valuable to us yet, as we don’t know what we need, or how we’ll use it, or mix it with other data, until we actually _do_ so.

By way of analogy, let me point to the internet.

Imagine asking people 10 years ago “what do you want the internet to do? What do you think you’ll be doing with it, and using it for, in a decade? We’ll focus just on that.” We had no idea what it would become. Thank goodness no one locked it down, or focussed too narrowly.

Open data and documentation

And thank goodness they documented stuff.

One of the major issues with a lot of open data currently is that it’s published with a “publish it and they will come’ attitude. Without good metadata. Documentation. The ability to find and interact with it as a non-specialist as well as a specialist.

It’s an issue people are starting to confront, thankfully.

NYC’s open data portal relaunch is a lovely example of how things could, and should, be done.

Another approach which looks very promising is the use of Facebook chatbots to help people find open data, and give examples of what one can do.

Open data and privacy

Having said all this, not all data should be open.

It’s imperative that it’s opened responsibly — privacy is vitally important, and increasingly so these days. The effects of personal data becoming public can be disastrous, at individual, community, national and even international levels. We can (and do) ruin lives when we don’t take privacy seriously.

Open data and GovHack

It’s my huge belief in the transformative power of open data that has attracted me to, and got me involved with, GovHack — New Zealand’s largest open data / open government / civic technology event.

GovHack — a free, national event taking place in 8 NZ cities — and open data generally are all about getting tech and government people to work and build _with_ their communities, not for them.

And it’s a way to show non-technical people that they, too, don’t have to be afraid of interacting with data. Ideally, we want kids and grandmas looking up the data when they have a question, rather than making their decisions based on op eds in the local paper, or from that guy down the local pub.

Come join us! 28–30 July, nationwide.

govhack.org.nz

— — -

aimee is an open data advocate, national co-ordinator for GovHack NZ, and content design/service design/engagement/digital consultant to central and local government.

She loves trail running (when she occasionally has time), dogs, motorbikes, craft beer, single malt, and talking about how to build stronger democracies. She’s always up for a chat :)

Find her on Twitter (@teh_aimee)

Find her on LinkedIn

Open data and us was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

International Open Data Day dawned bright and beautiful this year in Wellington.

And, instead of getting out into Wellington’s all-too-rare sunshine, a group of open data and environment enthusiasts gathered at the National Library’s beautiful net.work space to spend the day conceptualising, designing and prototyping environment-related products and services.

Check out the video below for more on the event. You can also read more — including about the 6 awesome projects — over on data.govt.nz’s blog.

Rapid prototyping with environmental datasets — International Open Data Day 2017 (data.govt.nz)

The event was organised and sponsored by data.govt.nz, Open Data NZ, Statistics NZ, National Library, LINZ and GovHack NZ.

GovHack NZ is NZ’s largest open data/open government hackathon, and happens across the country 28–30 July 2017. This year, Nick and I are leading it as part of the social good/volunteering component of our GovWorks NZ work.

International Open Data Day: Wellington was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In November 2016, Nick and I ran a service design workshop with Gisborne District Council, focused on introducing human-centred design principles into better supporting events in the region.

Here’s what we did.

— — —

Gisborne faces an interesting situation. It’s not on the way to anywhere, nor between anything. This means that people who visit this (stunning) part of the country are doing so specifically.

It also means Gisborne has to work harder to attract visitors.

Apart from the stunning scenery, events are a major way for Gisborne to celebrate itself and its residents, and also to bring in tourists.

They include major events like the annual Rhythm and Vines festival, as well as smaller community-run events and things like school galas.

The Council wants to do a better job of supporting events in its region, and the people who plan and attend them. So they contacted us and asked if we could come and run a learn-by-doing workshop with them, to:

• teach them some of the basics of service design and agile service development
• develop problem definitions, and
• prototype solutions.

Our 1-day workshop had both tangible and intangible aims

As mentioned above, the aim of the workshop was to identify potential service solutions for some of the existing problem areas the Council has around event management (both in- and externally).

We expected the workshop to result in some or all of the following:

• policy documents people could act on
• change suggestions supported by research, and plans of action
• service designs and/or initiatives
• (tech) platforms, and/or ways to use them
• things that hadn’t even occurred to anyone.

Less tangible but equally valuable results would include:

• experiencing different ideas and new work methods
• building real connections to people in the same team, other teams and in the community
• seeing how a structured innovation process can produce robust, concrete and human-centred results — even in just a day.

So many things, so few hours

Because we wanted this to be an initial crash course, and demonstrate both a range of different techniques but also how quick and powerful prototyping can be, we did a lot, in a very short time.

[Our participants were exhausted by the end of it, and in future we’ll have the data to back up our suggestion to clients that 2 half days is more productive, and much kinder, than one full day.]

The basic shape of the day used the UK Design Council’s Double Diamond process model. As a group, we:

• discussed definitions for “event”, and agreed that we’d include more than the large events, as many events might trigger Council requirements whether they know it or not, and wouldn’t necessarily know to apply to the Council for permissions
• split into groups to identify the range of events held in the region
• identified the common problems experienced by events and their organisers
• identified 3 core event types to focus on for the day: professionally-run events, community-run events and smaller events like school galas.

From here, we took people through:

• designing personas for event organisers and making an initial journey maps
• meeting as a single group to talk with a very senior event planner in the region, to learn from her frustrations and experience
• going through several iterative rounds of talking with event organisers, Council staff and other stakeholders to validate personas and journey maps, major pain points (ie problem definitions), and potential solutions.

Finally, we took all of the information and context that participants had gathered during the day, and:

• placed their validated prototype solutions into an organisational context, developing service outcomes, value statements and key performance indicators (ie “how do we know if we’re succeeding at this?”)
• reworked their journey maps for each of the new service initiatives, including outward-facing customer touchpoints and internal system and process touch points.

These final 2 pieces of work will form the basis of the inevitable business cases required by organisations like this to get new initiatives off the ground.

— — —

Fine, but what did you actually learn? What solutions did they test?

The team realised that:

• talking with “users” — both internal and external (eg event planners) — needn’t be scary, and is a brilliant way to figure out what’s not working, and how to improve it
• they didn’t really understand the timelines of event planners, and often had Council processes out of step with what event planners need to do, and when
• there are many kinds of event planners, and they all want early, clear communication about requirements
• event planners, general members of the public and Council staff all wanted to be able to look at which events where happening, when
• Council and those who interact with them often make assumptions about each other — sharing more information could mean big savings in time and costs
• event planners wanted a single source of contact with the Council — someone who could guide them through the necessary paperwork, liaise between them and all the Council departments necessary, and help them feel welcome and valued
• all isn’t broken — Gisborne District Council is doing lots well
• users (eg event planners) are happy to get involved and help improve matters, and it’s a great way to mend relationships, get people reengaged, and make sure services are relevant
• everyone’s keen on the same end goal — making sure people know how lovely Gisborne is, and enjoy their time there.

The team developed 3 possible solution themes. They went back out to test them with people, and used that feedback to hone them.

From there, we helped them build the frameworks they’d need to build business cases around the solutions, and sent them home, exhausted but also energised.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. We fed them back a number of suggestions for where to go next and, of course, are in touch with them to see how things go.

We’re as excited as they are :)

— — —

If you’d like to see the full report we wrote for the Gisborne District Council, please get in touch with us.

Interested in chatting with us about how we can help your organisation work on real solutions to real problems? Get in touch!

Service design for Councils: Better Gisborne events was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I spoke at the APIDays 2016 conference in Auckland recently. Here’s what I said.

Today, I’ll be taking you through some of my thoughts on open data and open APIs. I’ll give you a use case of how they fuel awesomeness by telling you a bit about a big open data hackathon called GovHack, and what I’ve observed and heard.

And I’ll be talking about why I believe we need more open data, especially in the form of open APIs, and how it’s good for all of us (including business!).

Open say what now?

Likely because of my shared background in science and language, I believe that strong, shared definitions of any term are amazingly useful when talking about it.

So first up, it’s probably useful to make sure we’re all on the same page with what I mean when I talk about open data, and open APIs.

(Innovation’s a fluffy term, but we’ll get to that bit later.)

For the purposes of this talk, we can define open data as any data that’s publicly available, and on an ongoing basis.

“Publicly-available” doesn’t mean for a short period of time only. It doesn’t mean for a select group of people. Or with barriers to entry like being charged to access it.

It means, quite literally, publicly available. To anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Of course, this definition also includes shoddily-made PDFs of council minutes, for example, so the data may be publicly available, but that doesn’t mean it’s hugely accessible, or even terribly useful for many use-cases (not without an amount of resource which acts in itself as a barrier to entry).

And it’s not necessarily live data. To put it another way — it’s static, and while it’s still useful to look for past trends and patterns, it’s not useful for any real-time application. It also, very easily, becomes out of date. And one doesn’t necessarily know when that happens.

One way to counter this, of course, is to make it machine readable. This can be done by the organization who’s releasing the data, or by members of the public or other organisations. To use our earlier example of Council minutes, someone might take those shoddy (and often rather buried) PDFs and turn attendance records trapped in them into a spreadsheet, for easier analysis.

An even better thing to do would be to also release the data in the form of an API. An open API — that is, one that’s publicly available. With a bit of luck, there’d also be some accompanying documentation about how to use the API, making it nicely accessible, too.

This allows people to analyse and pipe the information into just about any form they choose, from maps to apps. Not only is the data the most up-to-date available, but, as we know, it can be used to make realtime, living resources.

And we all know that devs far prefer an API to being handed an Excel spreadsheet (which may or may not have become corrupted along the line, too).

APIs in the wild: GovHack

We’ve all seen this preference in numerous situations. One I can particularly speak to is GovHack.

GovHack is the southern hemisphere’s largest open data / open government hackathon.

It started as a small civic hacking slash protest project in Australia in 2009. People there were…irritated…that some of them were being threatened with legal action, BY government departments, for using public government data.

It’s grown somewhat since then; government departments are intimately involved with it and, in some cases, actively on board!

Last year, GovHack spread to NZ as well. And every year it gets bigger, both here and in Aussie.

This year, GovHack NZ happened in 9 locations, and 22 in Australia.

In total, there were over 2,500 participants. Of the 429 projects that competed for the raft of local, national and international prizes, 65 were in NZ.

There’s much to be proud of there, of course. People tackled a very wide range of subjects, from lost dogs to climate change to fracturing societies.

And they did so with a tonne of data. 1,582 datasets, in fact. And not all government, either.

Of these, a fair number were APIs (I ran out of time to manually check and count them all — my apologies).

What I can absolutely tell you, anecdotally (haha, yes, I know anecdotes aren’t data)? is that those datasets that came in the form of APIs were particularly popular.

And often more trusted. There’s an idea that data served through an API is more…trustworthy, in some respects. That it’s more likely to stay up, at least for a while.

Of course, this brings me to the idea of the social contract behind APIs. I know there’s a lot of conversation around this in API circles, so I won’t bang on about it, but…

If one wants people to use one’s APIs, then one shouldn’t just take them down. Especially not without consulting with and warning one’s users first. Not only is it simply a not-very-nice thing to do, but it’s counter-productive.

If people are building a business, or a service, or anything really, they need to have some trust in the continuity of the substrate. The data. The API.

Or people will stop using the API. Which very neatly destroys the value of them in the first place….

Value?!

I hear a lot of puzzlement from people about why on earth one should GIVE away information. After all, data leads to information, which leads to knowledge.

And knowledge is power, right?

I’ll answer that question from a couple of perspectives — societal, and commercial.

The societal value of open data

There’s a strong case to be made that data that’s generated by publicly-funded institutions — eg government — should be available to the public who paid for it. Of course, I’m not talking about all data, and certainly not in raw form. We must be very careful around privacy, and not victimising or revictimising people.

But there’s plenty of data that can and should be shared. And a tonne of organisations, and research, backing up that open government data is a powerful thing.

It enables ordinary citizens to understand better what’s going on in their societies, and make more informed choices about the decisions they, and their elected officials, make.

It enables people to push for change — or the status quo — based on evidence, not anecdote, opinion or emotion.

It builds higher levels of digital literacy — since people need to understand the basics (or know people who do) in order to use the data, they have a stronger incentive to learn about it.

GovHack’s a great example of this. We’re consistently working to achieve higher levels of diversity amongst the participants (in every way) — I’ve had more than one person come up to me and say “I didn’t think these events were for me. I didn’t see what I could contribute. Now I do! And next time I have a question about my society, or see a problem around me, I feel like I can do something about it. I know that I can look for data around it, and tackle it either on my own or with other people. And I want to keep learning, and creating.”

It builds more transparent government and power structures, enabling people to hold their governments to account (sometimes to the horror of said governments, which is great).

And it gets people engaged. Fewer black boxes into which data disappears, never to reappear, means a less cynical and disengaged society. And the more people are engaged in their society, the better. After all, we live in a democracy!

And we get to interrogate god.

The commercial value of open data

I realise that these benefits don’t appeal to everyone. And however much one does — or doesn’t — subscribe to them, there’s also the very real fact that everything costs money.

Making one’s data machine readable costs money. Hosting data costs money. The development and maintenance of data in the form of APIs…costs money.

And, especially in business, one needs to take this into account.

Thankfully, there are strong commercial benefits to open data. Both as consumers and as providers of it.

Open data, and open APIs, mean that people can build businesses using that data. There’s a talk tomorrow, in fact, building businesses on government APIs!

And not only is this data available — meaning there’s the possibility of building a business on it — but it’s often free. Which is a very happily empty line item for any business and their accountants.

There’s also benefit as a provider, though, including for private companies.

Opening up and serving data gives you control of the narrative. You may not necessarily have much say over how it’s used, but you can build powerful stories about why you’re giving back, and how. We live in a world where, increasingly, consumers are looking to organisations to be good actors in the system.

In the decisions you make around the technology stack and language you use to serve that data, you can have a very direct effect on the state of art, and how it evolves (some of the people in the room will remember the VHS/Betamax fight, for example).

It’s also worth remembering, especially in larger or more complex organisations, that making data open allows the organisation itself to benefit from that data. Otherwise it’s trapped on desktops or drives, in random project folders, in someone’s head, or hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy-level information management systems.

It’s certainly not accessible, or useful, in any true meaning of the word.

Of course, you can affect what your competitors do. No one wants to be the last person in the room to do something. Nobody wants to be known as “those arseholes over there who aren’t coming to the party”. Especially by their customers, but also by their employees, colleagues and collaborators.

In turn, you can keep a closer eye on them, if you choose to do that sort of thing. You can learn from them, or compete with them. You have more ways to make your point of difference clear. Perhaps you might even collaborate with them

Commercial organisations already do this all the time. After all, sending one’s people to conferences to speak and network is, at the basis of it, open data lite. And served out as a human-readable, human APIs.

And there’s a final, obvious one. If we all take, but no one gives, then pretty soon there’s not much left to take… It’s only prudent to look after one’s ecology.

One of my favourite practical examples is in the area of patents (I’m not a patent lawyer, of course).

Patents benefit their holders, its true. But the progress levels rise sharply when patents lapse. Why? Because a far wider range of people has the chance to work with the information — to test it, improve it, iterate it, run with it, or build something completely new off it.

Another great example, and the obvious one I’m sure many of you have thinking of, is the open source software movement.

Smart organisations realised a long time ago that holding onto the code isn’t where one derives the best value. It’s the services one provides on TOP of that code that’s the powerful thing. Opening up the code allows a much larger group of people to work on it, and improve it.

And because anyone can use it, it’s far easier for that code to become widely used — I’m thinking here of the linux systems which underpin so much of our modern digital infrastructure, for example.

Open drives progress, not closed.

Data that’s locked away is lonely, and not really fulfilling its true purpose.

It’s like a single book in a library, accessible to only one person…

APIs-as-a-(library)-service

So I’d like to posit a way to look at the API ecosystem. As a library. Not the ones devs normally talk about.

I mean the meatspace ones, with books and magazines and graphic novels and people from all walks of life in them.

Libraries — especially public libraries — are the original shared information service.

They share a common language — not only in how the information is organized, but quite literally in language (of course, larger ones will also have spaces for other languages).

They present information in a range of formats. One isn’t tied to hardcover paper books. There are softcovers. There are picture books, and text-dense tomes. There are magazines. There are DVDs, and CDs. Increasingly, there are e-books. There’s fiction, and non-fiction.

There’s a huge range of subject matter.

They’re generally available. Because they’re staffed by humans, sadly they can’t generally be open all the time, but the knowledge they share is, if you use it (ie loaning books). And, generally, one can be sure they’ll be there tomorrow, and the day after, and will still have lots of amazing information to share.

There are services onhand (in the form of librarians, but also catalogues and other discovery engines) to help one find and digest the information.

There’s a long tail of use — from people who use them heavily, to people who pop in occasionally.

They’re (generally) free, and they’re pretty easy to find.

They’re a powerful connecting node for research, community, collaboration and creation. They bring together a wide range of people with different skills, interests, and backgrounds.

And the point? All of this does one, simple thing: it drives innovation. Not because they pay for themselves directly, or because they benefit their owners and funders directly.

Because they provide access to a vast, shared pool of knowledge. A much larger one than any one person could gather, or use. Their costs are shared between us all, but so are their (infinitely greater) benefits.

We can’t know that having this set of books in them will lead to this advance. Or that this particular group of people will do something amazing with the books. We can be certain that they’ll bring together the people, and the knowledge, that act as fertile ground for small and great advances.

Just like the internet.

Just like hackathons.

Just like this conference

And, of course, just like open data, and open APIs.

No database (should be) an island

I believe that de-escalating data as a source of power is a great and desired thing. As with open source software, the power should be in what one does with it, not keeping it in the proverbial locked safe.

There are umpteen cases studies throughout history of the enormous value generated when information is shared, remixed and built upon. Civilisation itself is one of them.

Open data opens the door to opportunities. For your business. For society in general. For people from all walks of life.

It’s an equalizer, and a potent source for good.

It’s also a very natural partner to the open source movement. Together, open data and open source can build open government and industry.

And open societies. More transparent. More free. More informed. More engaged. More truly powerful, as ways to advance human potential.

A better world.

Information wants to be free. You have the keys.

Now open the door.

—

Slides and videos of the other APIDays talks will be up on the website — there were some fabulous people and topics there :)

apidays.nz/

Slides themselves at link below.

drive.google.com/open?id=0BxHH3Miuys68S3llVFAxOF9NNVU.

— — —

GovHack 2017 is happening late July 2017. Want to get involved in some way? Get in touch! We’re looking for organisers, sponsors, participants and anyone else who wants in :)

govhack.org.nz

— — —

StatsNZ has just released a number of new prototype/experimental APIs. They’d love to hear back from people on how to improve them before they release more.

innovation.stats.govt.nz/initiatives/time-series-api-prototype/

Want to help us make our APIs awesome? Try out our prototype APIs and tell us what you think https://t.co/ADmgj7RH5o

 — @StatisticsNZ

— — —

Check out Open Data NZ’s (brand new!) video on open data and its potential.

Open data and APIs — fuelling innovation was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On 24 July 2016, a wonderful group of people gathered together in Wellington to talk about civic tech in New Zealand.

“Civic” NZ

New Zealand’s an interesting place. We’re isolated, small geographically and even smaller population-wise. We’re quite spread out. There’s also, unsurprisingly, a big difference between those of us who live in major towns and cities, and those of who live in rural areas. And we’re far from an homogenous population, either.

Much as we’re intensely proud of being New Zealanders, the word “civic” doesn’t get used much here.

People aren’t really taught about how government — local and central — works. Taking part in democratic processes like elections doesn’t seem to be seen as an important responsibility by many people (the reasons for this are numerous). And while a large number of people volunteer their time and skills, you might be hard-pressed to find someone who’d describe such work as part of their civic contribution to the communities and places they love.

“Civic tech” NZ

There is much, and growing, interest in civic tech here. Viewing New Zealand’s strong (and active!) open data, open government and open source communities as a Venn diagram of 3 interlocking circles, I see civic tech as as the centre part: the space where everything has the opportunity to interact.

And there are some brilliant civic tech initiatives out there already, like Wellington’s Hack Miramar group.

But given our context, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the civic tech movement here is relatively small and disparate. The people working in and around the space don’t necessarily know who else is working in and around the space. They don’t necessarily know what other projects and organisations are being started, running or winding down. There isn’t, essentially, a strong support and knowledge network.

It’s also possible that, perhaps because people have been using a range of terms for civic tech-related work (as well as everything I’ve mentioned above), we haven’t always realised that what we’re creating and doing could be defined as civic tech.

Read about why I keep going on about civic tech, how I’m defining it for these purposes, and why I think the term has value

Getting the ball rolling

There comes a time to take action. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter so much that one gets the first step right, as that one makes it.

So that’s what I did. I reached out personally and also put a notice on the local Open Government Ninjas mailing list proposing a venue and time, and asking anyone who was interested in this and/or future meetings to let me know.

Given how busy Wellingtonians tend to be, and the difficulty of arranging anything at short notice, I was thrilled at how many people made time to come to the meeting, and the enormously high calibre of every single person there.

The beginnings of something beautiful

It was great to hear what everyone thought — their hopes, and their concerns. From a personal perspective, hearing these awesome people echo what I’d been thinking was strong validation that there’s something with huge potential here.

It’s worth noting at this point that, while we were meeting in Wellington, we were talking about New Zealand in general. We all identify strongly with the idea of helping to foster, in any way we can, a more connected country. While civic tech itself generally works best at the hyperlocal level, many of the challenges involved in growing the space and networks involved require that we think more widely, too.

Our conversation was wide-ranging, but the main points included:

• can we be for civic tech what Internet NZ is for the internet here? Can we become a place of strong knowledge, a place of help and a place of support for people working in and around the space?
• we don’t want to and absolutely shouldn’t focus on the “tech” element of civic tech. Our focus should be on fostering civic engagement, using tech as one of the tools for doing this.
• how can we help people understand how government works, how to get involved and why it’s a great thing to do (even if it’s frustrating as hell sometimes)?
• how can we help government — central and local — understand how to be more accessible, and why it’s important? For example, how can we help improve existing consultation and submission processes, so people feel it’s worthwhile to engage?
• how can we help people find the support they need? [Stay tuned for my next post, where I explain the concept of a civic switchboard and my work to build one.]

As you can see, engagement, connection and education are core concepts.

Prototyping is another.

We can learn great lessons from what people are doing and have done here and internationally; we don’t want to reinvent wheels, and we certainly aren’t interested in the “not invented here” fallacy.

But there’s no panacea — we need to figure out what works in which situations and contexts, and why (or why not). And given New Zealand’s context, we’re in a very interesting position to do so — a city’s worth of people, spread out over a country roughly the size of the UK.

We think we can help in terms of connecting people, generating and sharing an overview of the ecology, supporting existing initiatives and, of course, working to plug major gaps.

And if that all sounds a bit fluffy? That’s because it is. We’re going to be thinking about and working on some core objectives, and exactly what we need to do to make them happen.

The only way to find out, of course, is to start :)

What next?

The website

I’m in the process of building a simple web presence, hopefully up by the end of this week. Its aim? To begin mapping out and connecting who’s doing what here in NZ, and providing a place for people to thoughts and resources. And it’ll be a place to share stories: of success and, perhaps most importantly, of challenges faced, failure and lessons learned.

It’ll also begin drawing together which organisations, people, projects and events are involved with civic tech and civic tech-related work in NZ. This might include open data, open government, open source, engagement, and…well, we’ll find out!

It’s a first step. It’ll change, improve and may become something entirely different. It may fall over, and something new might rise in its place. The only way to find out is to take that step and see what happens next :)

UPDATE: it’s live at openciv.nz!

The meetings

We’ll be meeting in person monthly, too. If you’re in Wellington and would like to come along, you’re always most welcome. More ideas, experiences and lenses are A Good Thing.

At our next meeting (later in August), we’ll be focussing on the outcomes we might want the group to aim for in the long run, and what impacts/intermediate outcomes might support those in the medium term. “What do we want, and how do we get it”, basically.

UPDATE: we’ve decided to change this a bit – we’ll be opening the discussion up to a wider group to discuss civic tech in New Zealand. Upcoming meetings will start to get into the more focused nitty-gritty of what we want to achieve and how we get there.

If you’re in Auckland, the awesome Caleb Tutty and Nick Williamson (my collaborator on this blog) will be starting something up in the near future.

If you’re elsewhere in NZ? Feel free to comment below, get in touch directly, and/or get involved when the website goes live. We’re all about connecting and supporting.

Related events

Finally — keep an eye (or even come to!) events like Open Source Open Society and GovHack NZ*. We’ll be there and yep, we’ll be posting everything related on the website, too!

It’s an exciting time and we can make real, positive change in our society. We’d love you to join us

— — —

Linky goodness:

• Hack Miramar
• Open Source Open Society (OS//OS)
• GovHack NZ
• GovHack

* Disclaimer: I’m a national organiser for GovHack NZ, and I know Hack Miramar and OS//OS organisers. I’m doing some fun meta-analysis of the over 400 projects submitted at this year’s GovHack, and will be releasing that soon.

** Thanks to Tim McNamara for the awesome term “Flaxroots”.

Flaxroots — civic tech in New Zealand was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Your elected members are there to represent your interests. But to do that, they need to show up at meetings.

Let me start with a full disclosure. From February 2009 until May 2014 I was a staff member at Whangarei District Council. As the person responsible for preparing the town plan for the district, I needed to attend a lot of council meetings.

These meetings are important, because this is the opportunity for elected councillors to provide direction to staff. They are also the forum in which all decisions are made, based on the information they are presented with. This decision-making authority is what you — the voters — have given your elected members.

Councillors make decisions that affect you, and they do this on your behalf. This vested responsibility is of course significant, and should not be taken lightly. And I have experienced first hand how this decision-making process works. Like any group of humans, the personalities, dynamics and balance of power ebbs and flows depends on the composition of the group.

I have seen projects succeed or fail because one particular councillor was absent.

Things I started noticing

Some councillors always seem to be there. Full council meetings, committee meetings, workshops, and even sub-committees that they aren’t a part of, but go to out of interest. They are usually the ones who seem to have a really thorough grasp of what is going on.

Then there are the other ones. The ones that always seem to turn up 2 minutes into the meeting, or disappear at tea time and miss the last session of the morning. I thought I started to notice a pattern, but wasn’t sure. Maybe it was because I got annoyed by people interrupting proceedings by turning up late, so I tended to notice that more than absenteeism. I decided to find out.

A matter of public record

The Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 requires council meeting agendas and minutes to be made publicly available. Most councils like Whangarei District Council publish their meeting agendas and minutes on their website. I decided to look through all the committee minutes for the current election term (since 30 October 2013).

Each council will generally have “Full Council” and “Extra-Ordinary Council” meetings that all elected councillors are members of. These are the meetings where delegations are issued, budgets are allocated, and policies are decided. Then there are council committees, which are typically tasked with “portfolios” of issues to deal with, such as finance, infrastructure, planning or community services.

In the Whangarei District, every councillor is a member of the Infrastructure Committee, Planning Committee, and Finance Committee. Subcommittees comprised of only some councillors are/have been the 20/20 Inner City Revitalisation Committee, Audit and Risk Committee, Community Funding Subcommittee, and Exemptions and Objections Committee.

So, how have our councillors been performing in terms of meeting attendance?

My methodology

I went through the minutes of every committee and subcommittee meeting and collected data on councillors’ attendance. Where minutes recorded an apology, I marked down a count of zero for that councillor. Councillors that were absent without an apology I also recorded as zero. I was tempted to dock a point for being truant, but I am doing my best to keep the data free from any judgement.

I noticed that the minutes recorded late arrivals, early departures, and other comings and goings during the meeting sessions. Not wanting to beat up on people needing to leave the room for, er, brief intervals, I adopted what I felt was the reasonable approach of ignoring any absence of 5 minutes or less. My attendance record does not penalise anyone who popped out to feed the parking meter or take an important phone call.

In hindsight, I wish that I had recorded every instance of absence, because after getting a long way into the data entry I noticed that one or two councillors were routinely 2 minutes late for the start of the meeting. Perhaps they didn’t miss anything past the “apologies” section of the agenda, but still, poor form.

The 5 minute cut-off turned out to be a good metric, though, because longer absences tended to be around 20 minutes or more. Since many of the meetings only ran for an hour, that was quite a lot of critical council business that was being missed. Where a councillor was in attendance, but missed more than 5 minutes of a meeting, I gave them a score of 0.5. Otherwise, they received full marks for attendance.

The scores

I have published the data that I captured from the Whangarei District Council Meeting Minutes on my GitHub data repository in .csv format. That data includes the attendance at every minuted council meeting since 30 October 2013, including all committees and subcommittees.

I am interested to see whether this information will help to inform voters when it comes time to elect a new council in October 2016. To this end, I have assembled some conveniently shareable “brag posts” for all aspiring candidates and civic-minded voters to share. You can find them all below, ranked in order of highest to lowest attendance scores for incumbent councillors.

I would encourage any #opendata or #opengov people to have a look and play around with the data to see if they could do something similar in their jurisdictions.

How many meetings has your councillor missed? was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How we’re looking after the participants at GovHack Whangarei

Free food is just one of the reasons to head along to your nearest #GovHackNZ event next month. Although it may be free, the saying “you get what you pay for” definitely doesn’t apply! At GovHack Whangarei we are going out of our way to source only the best food that the district has to offer, and we are using open data to do it.

Going on a data hunt

District councils are responsible for inspecting premises that prepare and sell food to the public. In the Whangarei district the council has passed a by-law that requires operators to display their food grade certificate on the premises. If you want to look up the grade before you arrive at the location, you can look up the food outlet using the council’s Food Grading Database Search.

It’s great that the council publishes this data on their site, but I wanted to have a play around with the data and put it into a map. There is no link that enables you to download the database, but the search function does enable the results to be returned based on grade or suburb. One way of pulling the data from the website is to select and copy the search results and put them into a spreadsheet for exporting as a csv file. The other option is one that I used to gather the same data set a year or so back before it was surfaced on the council’s website.

At an open data event put on by NetHui a couple of years back I found out about a super handy tool call Tabula, which extracts data from tables within pdf documents. I used this tool to select the data that was presented in the monthly reports to Council’s Planning Committee. After loading a pdf file into Tabula, you select all the tables you want to extract from within the document.

Once selected, Tabula gives you the option of copying the data tables to your clipboard, or saving them as a csv file. I used the latter option because I needed a csv file for geolocating the data.

Geolocating the data

If you want to make a basic web map of the data you can use Google’s My Maps. After creating a new map, you can open the csv file in a new map layer. That application will drop a pin on the addresses contained in the csv data table, and highlight any that it can’t find. For those, you can manually update the address data or drag the pins to the correct locations.

I wanted to do a bit more and display the data using CartoDB , so I used the geocoding plugin in QGIS to geolocate the address data. You can do this by importing the csv file into QGIS, running the tool, and then creating new latitude and longitude fields in the attribute table to hold the location data. From there, you can zip and upload the shapefile into CartoDB, allowing you to display the data in a web map.

See my map of food outlets in Whangarei coloured by grade

I had my own copy of this database from over a year ago, so the information I have also shows the grading certificates from previous inspections. That enables me to also see whether the grade is staying constant, increasing, or whether standards are slipping. That’s a metric that the live database doesn’t show, but I think it is important as an indication of behaviour. I’d prefer to eat food from an establishment that is getting better over time rather than worse!

Happy eating!

At GovHack Whangarei you can rest assured that we have gone the extra mile to make sure the food is great. It’s just one more reason for you to sign up for a weekend of awesome!

Want to have a play around with the data for yourself? I’ve published it here:

• https://github.com/Mashmatix/data/blob/master/FoodPremisesCleaned.csv
• https://spatialfusion.cartodb.com/viz/a53d1c22-36a2-11e6-8a18-0ecfd53eb7d3/public_map

Using data to avoid food poisoning was originally published in quicksand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.