The UK is a founding member of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a global effort to make governments better by promoting transparency, empowering citizens, fighting corruption, and harnessing new technologies to strengthen governance.

Work has already begun over the past five months on developing the action plan, with the Cabinet Office and a network of (mostly nationally and internationally focused) civil society organisations working together to develop a set of commitments. Together, these commitments will make government and other powerful institutions more transparent (including through opening up data), enable greater citizen participation in policymaking, improve the responsiveness of government, better public service delivery and enhance the accountability systems that, among other things, reveal and prevent corruption in public and private organisations.

The UK Government is working in collaboration with a network of civil society organisations to develop an open government plan with a set of concrete open government commitments.

We need your help to develop it further – telling us what’s missing, what works and what’s needed at a local level, and if/how you’d like to be involved in developing it in the coming months.

To sign up and for more information click here

An Open Data Future is an open debate that aims to look under the hood of the open data movement.

Over the past few years open government data has evolved from a niche concern to one that has been embraced by national government, European Commission and other states and organisations around the globe.

It has been advocated that Open Government Data will expose the inner workings of state institutions and thus enable an environment for greater understanding, accountability and efficiency.

The release of open government data has also been seen as an opportunity to add value to national economies through the creation of new services, new intelligence and a more networked economy through the free flow of data.

But ultimately what are the drivers behind this movement, who are the winners and losers and what should a society based upon open practices look like?

Panelists
Jo Bates – Academic at University of Sheffield
http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/is/staff/bates
Tim Davies – Researcher and Activist http://www.timdavies.org.uk/about/
Javier Ruiz – Campaigner for the Open Rights Group
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/people/staff
Tom Slee – Canadian writer and commentator, author http://www.tomslee.net/

Chaired by Yuwei Lin.

This event is free but likely to reach capacity very quickly so registering here is essential

Being held as part of the FutureEverything Summit of Ideas and Digital Invention, the weekend will be held at Four Piccadilly Place and will begin straight after the main FutureEverything conference ends with a launch event from 6pm – 7.30pm on Friday 22 March. The innovation challenge itself will begin at 8am on Saturday 23 March.
Routes to the future is set to be an intense, productive and exciting collaboration between the brightest minds in software development and data processing. Entries from both teams and individuals are welcome. The cash prize and development fund available is over £16,000.

Challenge Categories are:
Best use of real-time data
Best use of multiple datasets
Best application created on the CitySDK API
Most Innovative use of data
Best U21 application
Developers Prize

Amongst the datasets TfGM will make available will be GTFS schedules and realtime Centreline positional information as well as the data already available through the DataGM – The Greater Manchester Datastore.

Click here to sign up

Routes to the Future: An Innovation Challenge is a partnership between TfGM and FutureEverything supported by Open Data Institute, Tech Hub Manchester and Manchester University

Open Data Manchester is a meetup for all people who are interested in making data open for the benefit of citizens, businesses and public bodies alike.

The meetings are mix of presentation, conversation and sharing of tips, hacks and data. The event is an open forum and free.

Sign up on Eventbrite

It’s 2013 and hopefully everyone is rested after the Christmas break. 2013 looks like it is going to be an interesting year as far as open data in Manchester is concerned with a number of initiatives including the FutureEverything Summit of Ideas and Digital Invention – happening in March.

Topics to be covered will include ‘The Business of Open Data’ workshop happening on the 19th and 20th March and more significantly Routes to the Future – Transport Innovation Challenge for Greater Manchester happening 22nd -24th March. Will there at last be a release of realtime data from TfGM? – All will be revealed at the meeting.

If you have anything that you want to discuss, showcase or point out at the meeting – just let us know.

Sign up using Eventbrite

The next Open Data Manchester should be a good one. Hot off the back of the Manchester Hackathon we will be showcasing some of the things developed from some of the participants and having a bit of a debrief. Overall the feedback has been really positive but it would be good to see what could be improved.

As part of the Hackathon there were a number of datasets released by Salford, Trafford and most impressively by Manchester City Council. Some of the data released is a first for a local authority and some of it is quite contentious so worth a look.

Open Data Manchester will be hosting a delegation from Brazil who are on a technical visit to the UK to find out more about the open data, transparency and accountability, and Freedom of Information.

Finally if you are interested in how applicaitons develop during a hackathon, John Rees took a screenshot every 30 seconds whilst building his multi prize winning SATLAV application

Open Data Manchester is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Community.

For those of you who missed it, the first Manchester Hackathon occurred last weekend. Manchester City Council, FutureEverything and ourselves came together to create 24 hours of coding deliciousness.

The hackathon was part of Manchester City Council’s commitment to open data and was the motivation for the release of datasets, APIs and documentation for the event. Data can be found here on the MDDA website The variety of data available ranges from trees which is all the more pertinent as Ash Dieback spreads through the country, Contact Centre data and Contaminated Land which is a hugely contentious dataset. A lot of the data released was in consultation with the Open Data Manchester community.

The format of the Hackathon created an intense atmosphere in MadLab as 45 coders and designers strove to create something demonstrable by the 5pm deadline. In the end 16 teams presented their creations in two minute quick fire presentations.

The winners were:

Best Under 21′s Creation – £600 – Bus Tracker by 19 year old MMU student Bilawal Hameed, the Bus Tracker app will let you find the nearest bus stop to you, direct you to it and give you the times and destinations of the next bus due.

Best Visualisation and Developers Prize (voted for by everyone taking part in the Hackathon)- £600 for each prize, was won John Rees for his app called Sat Lav. If you are caught short in the City, you just open the app and it will direct to nearest public toilet including those in shops and bars which allow the public to use.

Best Locative Application, the £600 prize was won by Matt Schofield for his Taxi Rank Finder app. Matt’s app shows the nearest taxi rank to you and directs you to it. It also shows if it is a marshalled rank and its opening times.

Best Solution for an Identified Problem (£600 prize) was won by Slawomir Wdowka and Imran Younis for their Manchester Voice which would allow the public to submit ideas to the council, then checks records to see if other people have made the same suggestion. When an idea is developed it would allow the public to vote on it.

The grand prize of £1,000 + £3,600 in development funding was won by Data Crossfader, created by James Rutherford and Ashley Herriott, a visualisation tool that plots information on a map of Manchester to allow people to compare important sets of data. For example, using postcode details it shows the locations of road traffic incidents on a map, and then adds where speed cameras are, so if they is a particular area where accidents happen which are not covered by a camera, it easily shows that on a map.

By the end of the event a number of developers had been approached to develop their ideas further and we’ll try and keep track of where that gets to.

For a much more in depth post by James Rutherford click here

Below are some designs, help us choose by entering 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 in the reply box at the bottom of the page.

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In a post written for Open Data Manchester on The Economics of Open Data, regular member Robin Gower, explains how these characteristics mean that data will have a much greater economic and social impact if it is made available as open data. He also discusses the implications for established “closed-data” business models and for the government.