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In this how-to post we’re going to show you how easy it is to ‘open’ your data.

(I have previously written about opening up your data on my own blog.)

Why?

You’ve probably heard mention of open data in the press. To generalise, they’re probably talking about organisations publishing (usually on their website) data about the work that they do, for anyone to access and use.

When people with the right skills get hold of data about services they can create interesting tools, maps and visualisations by combining it with other publicly available information.

There is a growing movement towards requiring publicly funded organisations to publish information about the work that they do. This is already happening in the USA and it’s on its way to the UK voluntary sector. It’s already happening in the UK scientific and academic sectors.

What?

To be clear from the outset, this data is not the names of the people you work with, it’s not their date of birth or email address, it’s not even the postcode of where they live.

Opened data cannot be something that would allow others to identify a person.

Most of the data that you can open is just numbers. How many people you worked with last year, how many people access each of your different services, how many support groups you ran in the last year are just a few examples.

How?

For this example we’re going to extract and open data about the number of people you worked with in 2012.

Extract

In Lamplight run a work report with the filters:

  1. Date range 1st Jan to 31st Dec 2012.
  2. Attendance type ‘Attended’, so we don’t include anyone who cancelled or didn’t show up to events.
  3. Role ‘Service user’, so that we’re not including any staff or volunteers.

Run the report.

Lamplight work report
The table you get will show you the number of attendances at your work, the number of different people and the number of sessions you ran in that time.

Data table

Our next step is to download this data. Click on the download link and it will save to your computer.

By default it will save the file in a .xls format. This is OK but it will be easier to work with if it’s in .csv format. Open up the document and then ‘Save as’, changing the type to .csv

Publish

To open your data it needs to be in a place that others can find it.

The easiest way to do this is to put it onto your website. We like the idea of adding a /open page as the place that your opened data is saved on – like ours at www.lamplightdb.co.uk/open

If you do choose to do that then tell Slash Open so they can add you to their directory.

Share

You need to people that they’re free to use the data, so add this to your /open page:

“The data on this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.” – or alternative licenses if you prefer – you could use Creative Commons license chooser

Well done, you’ve just opened up your data.

What next?

Now that you know how many people you worked with last year, take part in the Open Data Challenge.

If you’d like any help with opening up your Lamplight data then just drop us a line.

Tell some people!  #opendata and #vscopen are twitter hash-tags used a bit, and let @slashopen know too (and tell us @LamplightDb).

There are other posts about open data that you can read and some things we’ve written elsewhere and other links on our /open page.

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In October last year we asked you to take part in the Open Data Challenge.

The challenge was created for Lasa’s Open Data event in September and all we wanted was as many organisations as possible fill in a simple web form with their charity number and how many ‘people’ (or organisations) they had worked with in the last financial year.

Open Data Challenge

The challenge was a simplified exercise to illustrate what could be done with a very small amount of opened data, but it also contained a very serious point about data.

Can you access the number of people you worked with last year, at the touch of a button?

By that, I don’t mean can you ask a staff member to spend an hour or more collating forms, adding them to a spreadsheet and then summing the total number of people. I mean can you (or your manager) go somewhere – either on your computer or online – press one or two buttons and get the number of beneficiaries, within, say 5 minutes max?

It’s a serious question. If you can’t easily find out how many people you worked with, how will you know how much time you spent working with them? How can you know how much your support is costing in order to bid for contracts? That is all before you even start to talk about evidencing the difference your work is making.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review wrote a blog post on the ‘Ten Technology Trends to Watch in 2013’. It was interesting that 3 of the 10 involved data. Firstly around measurement ‘what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get improved‘, secondly around ‘deploying data to answer burning questions’ and lastly the development of ‘knowledge hubs‘, stores for non-profit data, to open up to others for analysis, comparison and sharing.

Despite being a US centred post these are all definitely areas that are starting to develop in the UK charity sector and we’ll see even more of them this year, particularly as funding for the sector faces further cuts and organisations will need to demonstrate the impact they are having in order to compete. All of these trends assume that you can already easily access your data in a usable format.

If you’re feeling bamboozled by the 2013 trends then take a step back and think about that first question. How easy is it for you to find out how many people you worked with last year? Take a few minutes and give it a go.

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Sarah’s just written about charity Open Data on the New Philanthropy Capital blog, encouraging charities to enter the (very quick and hopefully very easy Open Data Challenge).  We’re asking for charities to enter their charity number and the number of people or organisations they worked with in 2011.  That’s it.

We figure that this information is already in a zillion annual reports and funding applications all over the place, but never in one place.

The information entered will be publicly available, and we’ll be hacking (and anyone else can too) it in due course to showcase the sorts of things that could be done once the data is there, in one place.