[This first appeared as a guest blogpost on the Lambeth open data blog]
At Lambeth we’ve been delighted to be recognised as one of the leading local authorities for open data (see Openly Local’s ratings), and we see this as an important part of our commitment to be a cooperative council.
We’ve already seen some good examples which show how open data can be used creatively by people outside the council to create useful apps and to give a greater level of transparency for the council’s work.
The recent Made In Lambeth event was a brilliant example of this (find out more here and check out the tweets at http://twitter.com/#!/search/Madeinlambeth).
This will be a journey and we’re determined to do more. Today we are taking the next step in our journey and we’re really excited to share this with you. Our release today includes:
- Our open data principles: clearly stating our commitment to become open by default
- Our schedule for the data which we will release: and an invitation for you to help us prioritise the information we make open
- A major update to our open data pages which now provide a range of data sets, other resources and links to apps we have built or which we have found useful
- FindIt: an app which our team have produced (in large part during their own time) to make our open location data available using Google maps
We’re ambitious to go further, and as well as an ongoing programme of work to publish more data and build a rich datastore, we are currently working to build APIs which will let anyone create apps using our data. We’re hoping to have a beta version ready for testing later this summer — please get in touch at opendata@lambeth.gov.uk if you’d like to take part in this. We want to learn about what will work and build something that will make a big contribution to cooperative working.
bytherye 