Open data coming together
Last week the Scottish Tech Army was given the opportunity to be part of Data Summit 2022, the flagship event of Data Fest, organised by The Data Lab. All the members of the management team have been part of big industry events over the years, but this was the first time that we had been at one as the Scottish Tech Army. Hardly surprising given that our origins were in the depths of the first and strictest lockdown in the UK and the intervening two years have been very subdued in terms of in-person event activity.
The event had a busy programme of high-calibre speakers, and the attendees were very positive about what they were hearing, but our activity was mainly confined to the exhibition hall, manning our stand to meet and speak with as many delegates as possible. It was a great opportunity to talk about the work that has been done by the community of volunteers in the Scottish Tec Army (now totalling over 2,200), the organisations we have supported (around 300 to date) and our newest initiative, the Tech for Good Alliance.
The event was a great example of the power of in-person interactions – as exhibitors, we could have found out about and tried to arrange to meet with any or all of the other organisations, but we certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it in the way we could at the event.
There was a really interesting cross-section of organisations and individuals present. With individuals, we were delighted both to have people actively seeking us out and people to whom we were a new discovery. We were visited by some of our volunteers and by people that had heard about our work and wanted to learn more. Equally, some people just stumbled across our stand and stopped by to find out what we do. The combination of the Scottish Tech Army as a community of individual volunteers and the Tech for Good Alliance as a framework to engage with companies in the tech sector meant that we could offer them ways to put their time and talents to work in the way that best fitted their interest.
Amongst the other exhibitors, we spoke with a range of existing and potential new partners. One interesting theme that we noted was a number of initiatives that are underway to bring order to the very fragmented and unco-ordinated open data landscape in Scotland. There is a range of organisations that have active open data commitments and programmes, including Scottish national and local government, Public Health Scotland, the NHS and a range of others. We know from our own experience in developing and publishing our COVID dashboard for Scotland that there is a lot of interest in such data if it is visualised and presented well, so this is an area of great interest to us.
There were three organisations that we spoke with at the Data Summit that have projects underway to create a master index of open data in Scotland.
The first is a project that was part of cohort 6 in the Scottish Government’s CivTech Challenge programme – the challenge asked “How can tech help make public sector data easy to find?”. The project resulted in the creation of the Dtechtive data search engine and API, which is now available as an alpha version.
The second is Research Data Scotland, a new organisation set up as a charity in 2022 as a partnership between government, academia and other public bodies to promote and advance health and social wellbeing in Scotland by enabling access to public sector data about people, places and businesses.
The third is one with which we feel something of a natural affinity – Open Data Scotland (ODS) is a volunteer-based group of data people that has taken the same think big, start small, move fast approach that has been the cornerstone of our approach in the Scottish Tech Army. They have already identified and catalogued over 1,500 datasets to date, which can be browsed via the search interface, with automated checks carried out weekly to validate that the data set is still available and accessible.
All of these initiatives offer the prospect of making the open data that exists and will be released much easier to find, navigate and use. Within the Scottish Tech Army, data visualisation projects are always of great interest to us and we are keen to do more – these resources will make it easier to do so and if you would be interested in working on projects like this please do sign up and get involved.