Back in 2010, I don’t think any of us thought that we would still be here 15 years later, but here we are, and a lot has happened since a group of people from across Greater Manchester – public and private sector, academics and activists, artists and journalists – came together to do good things with data and see if GM could be a leader in open data.
Open Data Manchester (ODM) was born from the Open Data Cities programme that had been developed by FutureEverything’s Innovation Lab. The programme sought to encourage public sector bodies to release data for the benefit of citizens living in the region.
ODM and its many members were active, often vocal and, to be honest, a little cheeky. They would often turn up to events en masse and, on occasion, events seemed to become ODM events rather than serving their original purpose.
The energy and enthusiasm of the community had a real impact. In 2010, working with what is now TfGM, Greater Manchester became the first region in the UK to release its bus timetables as open data; London soon followed. We also advocated for the data to be turned into a format that could be used in applications such as Google and Apple Maps.
GM soon became a centre of open data, with many of the local authorities within GM scoring highly in open data and transparency league tables.
Over the years, ODM continued to host events and partner on various projects, focusing on making data more usable through promoting and creating open standards and supporting individuals, communities and organisations to understand and use data for the benefit of themselves and their communities.
In 2017, with the help of Omidyar Network, we received the funding that enabled us to establish ourselves properly as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company. Based in the Federation building with lots of other social businesses, we flourished, with our network growing and our activities expanding beyond GM. In 2020, we were commissioned by the World Bank to develop the Open Data Strategy for the City of Izmir – it is now Türkiye’s leading city for open data.
How we collectively manage data for public benefit has been an ODM interest since 2012, and in 2020, working with Carbon Coop, we developed a model for small data cooperatives. This led to working with Aapti Institute and UN Foundation Data 2X to create a handbook for individuals and organisations to develop their own cooperatives. The international Data Cooperative Working Group was formed from this work, and we still host its bi-monthly meetings.
Our work helping communities better understand data also started to grow and evolve into our Data for Communitiesprogramme. We worked with residents in a district of South Manchester to collect and use mobility and air quality data in a programme that led to the development of School Streets in the area. We also worked with women and girls within the borough of Trafford to help them map their experience of community and safety. You can find out more in our Data for Communities blog series.
The ethical use of data is a theme that weaves its way through a lot of our work and led to the development of the Declaration of Responsible and Intelligent Data Practice in 2020 and Principles for Public Engagement Around the Use of AI within the Public Sector, which was adopted by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority in 2024.
Although they might sound prosaic and abstract, data standards, especially open ones, do make our modern world function. They allow people and their machines to understand each other. In 2021, we were asked by our friends at Dsposal – an ethical waste tech company – to develop a data standard to help tackle the problem of plastic packaging within the environment and boost recycling and the circular economy. Since then, we have worked with over 150 companies from around the world to develop the Open 3P standard for packaging data. The standard was originally developed for packaging in the UK, but due to packaging being often as complex as the thing it contains, the standard was extended for all packaging types and is now being internationalised.
Open 3P is now being advocated by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and was represented in Busan, South Korea, at the Plastics Treaty negotiations as a candidate to help create a better understanding of the volume and types of packaging materials produced. Read more about the standard here.
We are still hosting lots of meetings and events, from Design Justice Network and the annual Data Horror Stories to more thematic ones such as the recent Electricity Data Dive and Data and Policy events, but we are most delighted, as it is celebrating its 7th Birthday, to be running Joy Diversion again. So if you would like to join us in a double birthday celebration and fancy proposing expeditions to uncharted territories, revisit previously known places, or undertake other strange meanderings and diversions, join us on 17th May and, like most things we do, it’s free!
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Image credit: Will Clayton CC-BY 2.0