UKGovCamp

An idea for Saturday (which I believe is for making things rather than talking about them?):

It’s a bit of a holy grail (and is probably already being worked on or even exists, in which case ignore me), but it would be good if there was a slick, market-leading tool that made it easy for normal people (ie busy folk who need information and not a research challenge) to find and compare different datasets.

For example, I want to see if there’s a correlation between civic engagement and the citizenship curriculum, at constituency or ward level. This requires, at the very least, results of citizenship inspections and voter behaviour; but more information would be useful, such as for crime, school attendance, communication between constituents and MPs or councillors. However, the Ofsted data isn’t all in one place (as far as I can see) and seems to be broken down by region rather than ward or constituency. Although I can’t break that down any further, a tool could interpret how those regions are determined and map the other datasets accordingly (in other words it takes the broadest definition, understands how it was arrived at and maps the others to it). I still wouldn’t have constituency-level data for everything, but I would have a way to map all the datasets against each other.

And it’s probably a lot more complicated than that.

Thing is, while sets of data are so arbitrary, I don’t have the time or budget to do find them, compare them, clean them up and map them. That puts me right off even bothering. Therefore a tool would need to be very slick and competitive for me to want to spend time learning to use it (or even to be aware of its existence).

But like I said, I haven’t been paying attention so it’s probably been built already.

Topic suggestion (needs a bit more thought though):

Opportunities for and obstacles to collaboration between the public and voluntary sectors (both practical and idealogical).

For example, how willing are government departments really to share knowledge, responsibility and resources with charities (and vice-versa) and what processes support that.