Free your data and engage your community

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When you think of hacking, what do you think of? Spotty teenagers whiling away the hours in dark basements, trying to break into government computers, or the recent trial of Gary McKinnon, the UK hacker currently fighting extradition to the US over claims he hacked into dozens of defence computers?

However, hacking isn't just a pursuit carried out just for fun, or by Russian spies, there's also a growing number of civic hackers, who are using government websites and data to make life easier for ordinary residents.

The recent Young Rewired State event, which took place at Google's UK Offices in Central London, showed that civic hacking is becoming more and more widespread, with 52 under 18s working over the weekend to build a host of applications which use government data to build useful applications.

'Opening up our data can mean that we're getting  a younger, digitally switched on community involved, meaning that what we do takes in their views, as well as those of the usual suspects.'

Results of the event included a mobile application to track buses across London, a website that uses crime data to map the safest route to school and an online events and activities calendar for young people.

It's not just young people who are interested in civic hacking either. MySociety, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank that aims to build useful online tools to help people in their civic and community lives, has been coming up with useful projects for some time now.

TheyWorkForYou is just one example. It's almost a Google for Parliament - not only does it allow you to find out who your MP is quickly and easily (as well as get contact details), it also allows you to find out your MP's voting record and when they last spoke in parliament. You can also search for topics of interest, and find out when they have been mentioned.

This works by using data provided by Hansard and allowing it to be searched, compared and reused in all sorts of different ways. Before TheyWorkForYou, the only way to access this information was to actually read Hansard, and trawl through pages and pages of (often irrelevant) detail.

Closer to home, there's PlanningAlerts, which is hosted by, although not run by, MySociety. Once signed up to Planning Alerts (using just an email address and a postcode – you don't even need to know who your local authority is) you will receive an email alert whenever a planning application is lodged in your area. (Unfortunately, the site is currently suspended due to legal action by the Royal Mail, but the team hope to have it back up and running in the near future.)

Again, like TheyWorkForYou, this means that information is slimmed down and relevant, and also being pushed to the resident, rather than them having to actively search for it.

PlanningAlerts also offers something called an API (application programming interface), which makes the PlanningAlerts data available in a way that other programmers can use. At Lichfield District Council, I recently used the PlanningAlerts API to build Twitterplan, which allows you to receive updates via Twitter, rather than email.

So, how can local authorities make life easier for civic hackers, and why should we?

Well, first the 'how'. At the moment, a great deal of local government data is either not online at all, or if it is, it's often in an unstructured format, meaning civic hackers have their work cut out trying to tease data from websites or PDF documents. Making this data available as APIs means that a five-day job (or five evening  - civic hackers generally do this stuff in their spare time) a two-day job – because of the Planning Alerts API, I built Twitterplan in a matter of days.

You can see an example of some of the data we've made available to civic hackers and other interested folks at www.lichfielddc.gov.uk/data  – already our councillor and committee data is available on OpenlyLocal , a sort of TheyWorkForYou for local government, and some of our food safety reports are being republished on local blogs.

Lichfield has made data available to 'civic hackers' and other interested parties

Much of this is not difficult to do either (if you're technically minded), as long as the data is in a database, it can be presented in any way you want it. Even if the data is only on a PDF document, there are tools that can covert it to a usable Excel spreadsheet, which can then either be inserted into a database or published as it is.

But why should we do this? Engagement is a tough job, getting people interested and involved with local government is a long and thankless task, often resulting in the same old faces (generally the curtain twitching NIMBY type) getting involved. Opening up our data can mean that we're getting  a younger, digitally switched on community involved, meaning that what we do takes in their views, as well as those of the usual suspects.

Making data available 'in the wild' also means that a community can build up around this data, getting people talking outside the remit of the council. At the moment, dealing with the council is often a 'one to one' situation, communities building up organically mean that engagement becomes a 'many to many' situation with groups engaging directly with the council, off their own backs. If we open up data internally, we can also replicate this within the organisation.

An example of this is Help me Investigate, a site which allows people to get together and pool their resources to get information from a number of sources – although the tone of many of the investigations is negative to begin with, making data available quickly can only help engagement. Opening up data before Freedom of Information requests are made means that officer time is saved in the long run.

Even if none of these things convince you, an open digital society is an inevitability – Gordon Brown has recently hired Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the world wide web) to help central government find ways of opening up their data, and newspapers like the Guardian are making raw data unearthed by their journalists available to everyone. If we don't get on board now, we risk being left behind in the rush.

Stuart Harrison is the Webmaster at Lichfield DC and also runs the pezholio blog