OCSI news

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last week the Food Ethics Council launched the 2011 Food Issues Census report, presenting in-depth analysis from a survey of over 300 organisations working on food and farming. Alongside the report (which can be downloaded here), the Food Ethics Council also worked with OCSI, to create a more interactive way to present and explore the data [...]

As part of our Rural Evidence work for Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE), we’ve been analysing the strength of the rural economy for Local Authorities and Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) across England.
Data and reports have now gone up on our “Evidencing rural need” website, providing the information needed to effectively represent [...]

The government Indices of Deprivation were published earlier today, including the overview Index of Multiple Deprivation 2010 (IMD2010). Commissioned by CLG from the Social Disadvantage Research Centre at Oxford University, these are an update of the previous 2007 and 2004 datasets.
The full datasets and technical report are available at http://www.communities.gov.uk/communities/research/indicesdeprivation/deprivation10/.
We’ve been hard at work providing [...]

The OCSI Data and Report Packs support organisations manage and deliver their Local Information Systems more effectively and efficiently, freeing up local analysts to do real research by reducing the time spent on routine data formatting and inputting. Our analysis of the costs and benefits of the Packs identifies that [...]

We have been working with rural communities on understanding the available data, to get a clearer picture of rural needs and deprivation than is provided from a single source such as the Index of Multiple Deprivation. We recently launched the “Evidencing rural need” project and website resource, commissioned by Action with Communities in Rural England [...]

OCSI and Care Equation have recently launched the Planning4care Mental Health (MH)  and Learning Disability (LD) tools providing the intelligence that MH and LD service commissioners and providers need to improve service planning and delivery.
The tools and methodology have been piloted with six Planning4care users – Essex, Derbyshire, North [...]