A Small Victory

Through a fantastic team effort by our Road Safety Unit, our GIS team and Health & Safety, our open data site is now the proud owner of the School Crossing Patrol data. Finally, we are moving closer to my dream of  Walk This Way, Talk This Way becoming a reality.

For anyone who has been privy to my Open Data presentation, you will know that this is one of my Town Mayors. For those wondering what on earth I am on about, watch out for “Kate Sahota – Open Data Promoter”, coming to an open data event near you!

Mature County Council, GSOH, seeks local media developer to share good times, funding opportunities

Hi, I’m a large public sector body based in Warwickshire, I have lots of experience, a great sense of humour and a burning unfulfilled desire to make the most of my prodigious open data assets.

I’m looking for a dynamic local digital media development company to share evenings out, trips to the cinema and maybe something more lasting… like working together to apply for up to £30,000 worth of funding to develop exciting new open data applications for Warwickshire, more details here: http://www.nesta.org.uk/areas_of_work/networked_society/digital/make_it_local

If you are interested please get in touch via opendata@warwickshire.gov.uk – you don’t need to include a recent photo, but some details of your experience would be welcome, as well as any ideas you have for open data applications that we could build together.

We can meet in Warwick town square, I’ll be dressed as a huge concrete building with a pond out the front.

No flies on us

Now the dust has settled after the highly successful Hack Warwickshire competition, there are no flies on us as we have just released a whopping 12 datasets. These datasets are all related to Waste Management in Warwickshire so come and have a look and see if you can do something exciting with our rubbish.

The highly awaited locations our School Crossing Patrols are imminent, as well as some very interesting data around our energy consumption in council buildings. We’ll be blogging and tweeting as soon as these are available.

Discussions are taking place on the £500+ expenditure figures with our finance teams. Our staff are beavering away tidying up some of the data to ensure there is no personal information at risk of being published. We hope to have something out in the next couple of months.

Never mind the World Cup, here are the Hack Warwickshire results

After 3 hours locked in the War Room of Warwickshire County Council, we are delighted to announce that the winners of our inaugural Hack Warwickshire competition are:

 Lewis Wagner with his Warwickshire Library New Releases hack

 and

 Matt Hawthorne with his Warwickshire Wired Hack

Congratulations should also go to Karen Ramsey-Smith for her great idea and Chris Heilmann for his excellent use of Yahoo! YQL, who are both the recipients of Apple iPod Shuffles.

 The standard of entries was great and our judges were all very impressed with what they were looking at. Dave Coplin, of Microsoft, said

“My goodness, there’s some good stuff in there”

Thanks to everyone who got involved, we’re delighted with the outcome and, remember, there will be more opportunities to Hack Warwickshire soon.