Articles

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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resources (if you ignore underpinning datasets such as Ordnance Survey geographic stuff), despite being 10 years out of date.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 [...]

Earlier this month, the Cabinet Office transparency team (led by Francis Maude) published the Open Data Consultation paper.
On a first skim, the consultation has lots about getting more data out - proposing an enhanced right to data, and a presumption that public bodies (and public service providers) will need to publish data. All [...]

We’ve been keeping a set of links for Indices of Deprivation visualisations and analysis. Get in touch if you know of any more.
Visuals:

Guardian map at Super Output Area level: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/29/indices-multiple-deprivation-poverty-england#zoomed-picture
Maps of England from Alasdair Rae, including cartograms: http://undertheraedar.blogspot.com/2011/03/indices-of-deprivation-2010.html
Coventry: http://ias.facts-about-coventry.com/IAS/dataviews/report/fullpage?viewId=236&reportId=234&geoId=7&geoSubsetId=199&geoReportId=7774
Cornwall: www.cornwall.gov.uk/deprivationmap
Nottingham: http://www.nottinghaminsight.org.uk/IAS/dataviews/report?reportId=383&viewId=992&geoReportId=26806&geoId=5&geoSubsetId=
Change over time in London: http://spatial.ly/eEGcEO

Comments:

Guardian DataBlog: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/29/indices-multiple-deprivation-poverty-england
OCSI: http://www.ocsi.co.uk/news/2011/03/24/headline-results-from-the-indices-of-deprivation-2010/ and http://www.ocsi.co.uk/news/2011/03/24/why-the-imd-is-still-important-in-the-open-data-age/
Centre for Cities: http://centreforcities.typepad.com/centre_for_cities/2011/03/the-index-of-multiple-deprivation.html
Regeneration [...]

(See the previous post for background information on the Indices of Deprivation 2010)
Overall, the IMD 2010 shows broadly similar results to the older IMD 2007 - areas that were deprived in 2007 are still in the main those that are highly deprived in 2010 (with a correlation of 0.986 between the 2 timepoints). Overall 66% [...]

The government Indices of Deprivation were published earlier today, including the overview Index of Multiple Deprivation 2010 (IMD 2010). The IMD is used very widely to target programmes and resources to tackle inequality and deprivation - below I set out my thoughts on why the IMD is still important, despite the wealth of data [...]