News and publications

Best wishes from us all at OCSI for a great Christmas and wonderful 2012. See you next year.

Want to use your knowledge and skills to make a difference in the real world? This is an opportunity to gain experience in an exciting and challenging consultancy environment focusing on improving public services.
We are looking for one or more interns to work in any one of the roles below. You will be working closely [...]

Data4nr (www.data4nr.net) is a well-used, trusted and freely-available source to help users find data & information to support targeting, monitoring, priority setting and performance management at local level. Data4nr also underpins national services such as Data.gov.uk and the academic data liaison service.
We are surveying Data4nr users to find out which parts of the service provide [...]

The Head of IT at Brighton & Hove Council recently weighed-in with a big offer to the Open Data Brighton & Hove group - “tell us what data you need, and we’ll open it up”. Having worked with government data one way or another for about 20 years, that sounds like opening up the sweet [...]

There’s a renewed interest in Coastal Regeneration. The Government recently announced that half of the Crown Estate’s income from its marine activities will be recycled into the Big Lottery Fund administered Coastal Regeneration Fund to “support regeneration and economic development”.   Coastal communities will bid for cash from the fund, which has in the region of [...]

Summary
It has been a key government ambition in recent years to help the most deprived areas ‘close the gap’ against national averages. However, there has been a lack of good labour market data to identify the success of these programmes.
Recently-published labour market data can be used to identify compare labour market patterns by level of [...]

We are really pleased to launch our Numberhood smartphone app - ‘local stats in your pocket’ (iTunes). Although there are lots of sources of data on local areas, we felt that none really does the job of providing easy-to-use summary information across the range of important issues. And we thought we could [...]

The Head of IT at Brighton & Hove Council, Paul Colbran, recently weighed-in with a big offer to the Open Data Brighton & Hove group - “tell us what data you need, and we’ll open it up”. Having worked with government data one way or another for about 20 years, that [...]

We are very excited to be collaborating on the DataBridge project, exploring how communities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises can make use of open data, explore it, combine it with their own information, and use it in funding bids, improving services, influencing, proving need etc.
DataBridge is run by the tireless Jo Ivens, with [...]

I’m going to take a punt that the Census 2001 is still the most widely used data-source in the UK when it comes to targeting local services and allocating resources (if you ignore underpinning datasets such as Ordnance Survey geographic stuff), despite being 10 years out of date. I’m yet to come [...]