OCSI » OCSI news

OCSI are looking for interns!

tom.smith@ocsi.co.uk — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:57:27 +0000

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 with the OCSI team, but need to think on your feet and take the initiative when required.

The positions are three month contracts working 35 hours a week at our central Brighton office. Interns are paid the Brighton Living wage (currently proposed to be £7.20 per hour).

Role	What could you be doing?	We are ideally looking for applicants with …
Data	Working with the team to provide local communities and public sector agencies with the intelligence to support good decision-making and service delivery. E.g. exploring, analysing, visualising and interpreting data using Excel and other data software.	Undergraduate / postgraduate degree (or equivalent experience) with fair amount of quantitative analysis, e.g. economics or social/ physical sciences.
Technology	Helping develop our data and technology to help people do more things in better and faster ways. E.g. improving how we visualise geographical and time-series data using Google maps/ charts, Gapminder and other technologies, and further developing our in-house databases and reporting tools.	Undergraduate / postgraduate degree (or equivalent experience) with fair amount of programming. Programming experience in any of VB.NET, SQL, PHP and Excel macros would be an advantage.
Marketing & sales	Strengthening the different ways we market OCSI and services. E.g. helping develop and monitor email and social media campaigns, developing marketing material.	Marketing experience/ skills, copy-writing, social media, know-how to monitor success of campaigns.

About us

Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) is a social research “spin-out” consultancy from the University of Oxford. We’ve worked with more than 100 public and third sector organisations to improve their evidence-base for decision-making and delivering better services.

Based in central Brighton, we work with clients around the UK. For more about OCSI and our projects, see www.ocsi.co.uk.

How to apply

To apply, please email Emma.James@ocsi.co.uk:

Covering letter highlighting why you are the right person for the role
CV, including details for 1 referee (work or academic).

For an informal discussion, please contact Tom Smith, OCSI Director, on 01273 810 270.

OCSI is an Equal Opportunities Employer and we encourage people from all backgrounds to apply. Applicants must have the legal right to work in Britain.

[A printable version of this ad is available at http://www.ocsi.co.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/ocsi-intern-dec2011-final.pdf]

Help us improve data signposting for local areas

tom.smith@ocsi.co.uk — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:44:54 +0000

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 real value, and which future developments should be prioritised.

Please help by taking the 5-minute survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/data4nr - thank you!

Numberhood - local stats in your pocket

tom.smith@ocsi.co.uk — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:21:31 +0000

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 have a go rather than just talking about it, hence Numberhood.

Numberhood shows how your local area fares on the important issues – the economy, unemployment, education, health, crime, housing and community strength. Data is shown for key issues and indicators, with data charts and descriptions to help you understand patterns and trends.

Key features include:

Data for all Local Authorities in England, allowing you to compare your area with others, and explore trends over time
Data visuals include line-charts, bar-charts and tables
Text description of the key data features for every area
Free download for the Overview theme, with in-app purchase to access all ten themes and 80+ indicators
Regular updates to the data.

Possible users of Numberhood include:

Local communities, e.g. needing evidence on the local economy, jobs, skills base and so on to challenge local service delivery, support inward business investment etc.
Councillors, MPs and officers in public sector organisations, e.g. wanting up-to-the-minute data on the local area to set priorities, identifying how the local area fares on outcomes against other areas (current position and recent trends), and commissioning local services.
Researchers and students: quantitative summary of the local area, in comparison with other areas.
House-movers: Wanting info on the local area they are moving into.

All data is based on public sources (details of all indicators are provided in the app), and use the data.gov.uk and www.data4nr.net open data systems run by government.

Numberhood is currently available for iPhone/ iPad from the App Store, with Android and Blackberry versions in future. The free app covers 11 headline indicators, with an in-app purchase (£1.49p half price introductory offer) opening up 70 more indicators.

For more info see www.numberhood.net or download from the App Store.

We’d love to hear from you if you have any comments on Numberhood, suggestions for improvement, or queries about the data or functionality - email/ call us on numberhood@ocsi.co.uk or +44 1273 201 345.

DataBridge - helping communities use open data

tom.smith@ocsi.co.uk — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 13:18:41 +0000

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 support from OCSI and the Brighton CVS Forum.

OCSI are working with the voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors to:

identify relevant data
ask the right questions to get manageable and relevant results
add in their own data to help improve evidence
get a usable product to help their organisation
identify gaps in data and gaps in knowledge about using data

We’ll post more up here from the project over the next couple of months, also worth keeping an eye on the www.databridge.co.uk blog.

Visualising food issues data

graham.lally@ocsi.co.uk — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 11:06:37 +0000

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 (also available from the downloads page).

The survey contained a diverse set of questions in order to understand the scope and structure of the sector, and we wanted to meaningfully reflect this on the site, while still allowing visitors to browse through data easily.

With this in mind, the main way to explore the data is by choosing an indicator to view, and a category to break the data down by - for example, the number of organisations by type (click image to view full-size, or the link beneath to view on the site):

[View this on the site]

Additionally, the data can be filtered by further criteria to get a more selective view of the sector, e.g. to select UK-based organisations only:

[View this on the site]

Second, we wanted to show how organisations’ values, measured as a series of agreements with statements, could be compared to the sector’s combined values overall:

[View this on the site]

Finally, we added some simple visualisation of the partnership sizes measured by the survey, using Many Eyes‘ Bubble Chart component within the site:

[View this on the site]

More information about the report can be found here.

Rural economy analysis for LEPs

tom.smith@ocsi.co.uk — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:28:40 +0000

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 rural issues. Get in touch with the ACRE team if you would like copies of the analysis.

Indices of Deprivation 2010 launched

tom.smith@ocsi.co.uk — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:03:51 +0000

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 data and visualisations to our Data Packs users, exploring why the IMD2010 is still important, and identifying the headline national and local messages. For further analysis of the Indices and other key social and economic data, please get in touch!

OCSI Data Packs save local information systems time and money

tom.smith@ocsi.co.uk — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 07:39:11 +0000

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 the Packs could save up to 67% of the cost of doing this work in-house. In addition, the Packs can be delivered and installed within 2 weeks - helping ensure that local systems are up and running to support local intelligence and decision-making.

Government-commissioned research has identified average running costs for Local Information Systems (LIS) are £63,000 per year (ranging up to £160,000), 80% of which is staff time. Surveys of LIS managers on ways to decrease costs mainly focused on decreasing the time taken to input data.

The Data and Report packs provide:

Consistent, nationally published sets of themed indicator data compiled at the lowest geography available, including time series to the most recently available data
Data for any customer-defined areas (such as local priority neighbourhoods) and suitable comparators (such as similar local authorities)
Detailed searchable metadata provided by the data suppliers and enhanced by OCSI to meet required standards
High quality outputs (including profile reports and other data views) loaded straight into user systems
Regular and timely updates of data and outputs.

See the OCSI Data and Report Packs page for further information, or contact us on 01273 201 345 or datapacks@ocsi.co.uk.

Helping communities understand the story from the data

tom.smith@ocsi.co.uk — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:09:15 +0000

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 (ACRE). The website provides information needed to effectively represent rural issues, presenting key indicators for rural places across England.

As a follow-up to the project, we’ve been talking to rural community groups, and running workshops on how they can understand what the data actually means in their area, picking out the key stories from the analysis, and identifying how this can be used to influence local policy and service delivery (with Action for Rural Sussex providing very useful examples of how the information can be used successfully at local level). We are in the process of developing learning resources from these workshops, which will be disseminated to the ACRE network of rural community groups.

Planning4care Learning Disability and Mental Health tools launched

tom.smith@ocsi.co.uk — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:12:02 +0000

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 East Lincolnshire, Rochdale, North Tyneside and Bolton – and provide:

credible evidence on needs and costs for planning and commissioning MH and LD services
locally sensitive baselines and projections of demand for services by MH and LD groups
modelled cost and service implications based on adjustable scenarios of demand and service patterns
outputs that translate directly into quantifiable service requirements
tools designed for easy access by users, that are practically robust and require a manageable amount of data input.

Please contact us if you are interested in finding out more on how Planning4care can help Mental Health and Learning Disability service commissioners and providers in your area, sign-up for demonstration access to the tool and data at www.planning4care.org.uk/register/, or download the information pack for more information.