A Facebook quiz that challenges perceptions of crime and a website that gives the public the chance to feed into local neighbourhood policing boards, are two of the ways that government data is to become accessible to the public following a ‘hack day’.
The Home Office, Cabinet Office and Ministry of Justice opened their doors to 10 techies from rewiredstate.com who used data.gov.uk and the web to develop tools and services that help people feel safe and confident in their homes and neighbourhoods.
The techies spent a morning working with Home Office and Ministry of Justice datasets before presenting their ideas to the Prime Minister’s information advisers Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, and Prof Nigel Shadbolt as well as civil service policy makers.
Meg Hillier, Home Office Minister with responsibility for identity said: "Events like this make official data more accessible and useful to the public and are an important part of our work to develop smarter government that is more open, more accountable and does more for less.
"We live in exciting technological times that give us new ways to communicate and interact with each other. With events like this the best of British IT talent are bringing government data to life and making it useful for people in their daily lives."
Ideas produced at the hack day included:
a six question Facebook quiz asks users about their perceptions of local crime rates before the reality of crime in the area is revealed;
the ‘How’s My Town’ website, created by Josh, 15, the youngest programmer at the event, which allows users to gather data about living in an area including crime, schooling and internet provision by simply putting in your postcode; and a site which merges information produced from Safer Neighbourhood Panels, made up of local residents with an interest in setting the neighbourhood police agenda, with true crime figures. The website gives people the chance to feed back to the panels if they disagree with the priorities being set. It was developed by Richard Pope from ScraperWiki.com who used his own experiences of being on a Safer Neighbourhood Panel.
Links to all hacks, which are in a development stage –
