Community Insight

Community Insight was a feasibility study into the use of open, local data to improve various aspects of the lives of people living and working in some community. We explored a range of different applications that would be enabled, or improved, by better access to data, from sharing information about allotments to community recycling schemes.
In particular, we were interested in ways in which data services could be used as a platform to enable people to gain new awareness of their local communities, and how they could participate more fully in the life of the local community.

The project's feasibility study was followed by the development of a prototype service which integrated a number of factors, such as achievement grades, distance from home (on foot or by car), and so on, into an interface which parents could use when selecting a school for their children. The richer data available by integrating data from heterogeneous sources meant that parents could express a more nuanced set of criteria for their ideal school, rather than just focusing on academic achievement via the school league tables.