Hi Folks – we haven’t updated the site since 2010 – just keeping it here as a record.

As I’ve previously written, the COINS database is not just a very significant release of open data, it’s also quite hard to get your head round.

With this in mind, Her Majesty’s Treasury is holding a seminar on July 2 2010, from 9.30am to 12.30pm for coders and others who want to understand more about the database, which provides details of all government spending. If you contact coinsdatarelease@hmtreasury.gsi.gov.uk by Friday June 25 2010 you should be able to sign up for the event.

Visit this link to the data.gov.uk site for more information on the event.

A couple of weeks ago the government did something really significant. No, it wasn’t anything to do with the Big Society – significant though that may be. It was the release of one enormous database, known as COINS.

Essentially COINS (and I do really like writing it in capitals) is the detail on everything the government in the UK spends at every single level.

The treasure trove of information is so big it’s caused people considerable trouble to download, but if you can make sense of the thousands and thousands of entries almost every expert agrees COINS is the grand prize, the data release most likely to transform our understanding of government.

I won’t bother saying much more, because there’s, frankly, not that much to say. It’s going to take a long time to get our heads round the database. But, if you’re interested in finding out more about how it will be used and is being used, here are some interesting links to keep you going.

The basics:

• This helpful explanation from HM Treasury should clear up some of the basic questions about COINS – what it is, how the data has been presented and who might find it useful. Since there’s so much complex informationn, HM Treasury reckons it might be more useful to organisations, rather than individuals. This, gulp, 31-page PDF gives you a full description of how to understand COINS.
• The Guardian, which to its enormous credit has been at the vanguard of the fight to open up government data, has followed the release closely. This post does a good job of summming up what it’s all about.
• Here’s Alpine Interactive‘s visualisation of spending by department that gives you some impression of what COINS can be used for, too.
• But, perhaps most impressively and most excitingly, you can get to grips with COINS by looking at Wheredoesmymoneygo’s online search tool for the database.
• This excellent blog post will explain what the most important fields in COINS actually mean. And the Guardian has a glossary of terms here.

The July Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery will be on Thursday July 15. It’s back at the usual venue, the Studio, which is at 7 Cannon Street, off New Street. The postcode is B2 5EP.

The surgery will take place at the usual times – from 5.30pm to 7pm – and all voluntary and community groups are welcome.

You can sign up for the surgery by following this link.

The surgeries are run by volunteers from the Birmingham Bloggers’ group and are completely free events to teach voluntary and community groups about the social web and how it can help the work that they do.
If you want to find out more about the surgeries, please have a look here.

Thanks to Paul Bradshaw I recently came across a post by Tony Hirst who has very helpfully provided an extraordinary lesson in the joys (and I do mean joys) of scraping data using Google Docs, which I strongly recommend following if you’re at all interested in these sorts of things and haven’t seen it (it was written nearly two years ago).

In just a few very easy steps, as Tony very helpfully points out, it’s possible to get data to appear magically in your spreadsheet (from Wikipedia) and then turn that data into a map, with Google Maps via Yahoo Pipes . It’s just a matter of sitting down and reading Tony’s post – and carefully following it.

What’s remarkable is that much of this is so straightforward. Admittedly, Yahoo Pipes – an extraordinarily powerful tool – does take some getting used too. But then there are people like Tony who can help you get used to some of its quirks.

I followed the tutorial word for word and got almost everything working, but have had a little trouble with the map part. It turned out there have been a few problems with the Yahoo Pipes location module, which appears to be a bit tempremental. I’ve since learned from Mary Hamilton that you can concatenate a bit of postcode in to get it working, but am yet to try that.

Still, this blog post is very much recommended. I’ve started to muck around, as a result, with scraping data from Birmingham City Council’s website. In particular, I’ve had a bit of a go at getting swimming pool opening times off the site.

Helpfully (although I’m quite sure it wasn’t deliberate) the website is organised into tables. It’s relatively straightforward to grab the contents of the table and stick it in the spreadsheet. However, the tables don’t all follow the same rules. Some have a Monday to Friday field, for example, while others have a separate entry for each day of the week.

Nonetheless, it opens up the possibility of gaining a greater understanding of swimming pool opening times in Birmingham as part of my ongoing investigation into swimming pool provision in the city.

We’re now looking forward to the next Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery, which will be at the Studio in Central Birmingham on Tuesday June 8 between 5.30 and 7pm. The address is 7 Cannon Street, Birmingham, West Midlands B2 5EP.

If you’re from a Birmingham-based voluntary or community group and would like to receive some friendly advice on using social media, then you can sign up for the surgery by following this link to the Social Media Surgery Plus site.

There’ll be another surgery in July and then we’re likely to take a break in August, before being back in September. I’ll give you a dates as soon as possible.

We’re heading towards our next Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery, which will be on Tuesday May 11, 2010 at the studio, 7 Cannon Street, which is just off New Street in central Birmingham.

If you belong to a Birmingham-based community or neighbourhood group or charity please come and join us. You can drop in any time between 5.30pm and 7pm. All local charities and voluntary organisations are invited.

To find out more about the event and to sign up please follow the link here.

Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal

Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal spoke briefly during his presentation about his work with several councils to provide open election data for the elections on May 6.

As Chris points out it is something of a surprise that election data isn’t just available freely. But it isn’t. Well, at least until Chris got involved.

I got a chance to speak to Chris about why he was interested in providing this information and how he went about the process. He makes some really valuable points:

• The only database of election results is commercial, but it should be a matter for public record – and therefore free.
• While local authorities do publish results on their websites, they do so in lots of different ways – with different formats and styles.
• Chris is on the local public data panel. Councils have approached them but don’t know how to do it.
• It can be intimidating to get involved in open data for public authorities

As a result, Chris had the idea that he could get councils to produce their results on the web in a consistent machine-readable form. Then it’d be possible to build up a database, while councils could begin to learn about how to use open data.

• While it took some time to get the project off the ground, now a number of people have started to get interested. Very recently there are many councils involved and Chris says that councils have started to help each other.
• There are at least 30 people in local authorities who are beginning to understand how open data can be useful to them.
• Now they’ll have a database with between 20 and 40 local authorities’ election results, some going as far back as 1998.

Now Chris says it can be demonstrated that local authorities can be part of the open data movement in a fairly simple way. Chris talks passionately about how big, monolithic projects often turn out to be useless. Instead, he’s much more interested in small projects that be demonstrably useful – and will help people to learn.

Rob Benson of BEN PCT

Alex Burrows, head of strategy at Centro