Friday InstantAtlas link of the day – John Patterson (Blackpool Council)'s new blog and IA User Conference 2012 (Rochdale)!

Friday has started out on an amazing high for me. Not only do we have sugar donuts (courtesy of our lovely Sales team) but we have this awesome unsolicited blog post from blogger John Patterson (Blackpool Council).

Did you present at the conference? If so, head over there quick!

Did you go to the conference? If so, you might be in one or two of his pictures.

Do you want to know what happened at the conference? What are you waiting for – go go go! (I’ll wait right here while you do.)

Now that you’ve read his post, did you wish you went the conference? If so, that makes two of us. That’s right, this friendly neighbourhood Support team member was supposed to present after @frenchpeter. And unfortunately, I was very ill that weekend and could not make it. I can only wonder what @Jonopatterson would have made of my presentation….

 

How Wolverhampton’s Local Information System is driving consistency of data use and helping deliver evidence-based strategic planning

Background

The Corporate Strategy and Improvement Unit at Wolverhampton City Council provides statistics, information, research and intelligence for decision making and is responsible for demographic data held by the council.

Debbie Turner, Policy Officer (Research & Information) in the Unit, says the decision to develop a Local information System (LIS) came from a recognition that data wasn’t being used effectively and that there was a great deal of duplication of effort when it came to local intelligence.

“We were getting a lot of requests for the same information, often from the people working together on the same projects or in the same service while at the same time we knew there was good work going on in pockets across the council and other organisations,” she says. “We also spent a lot of our time co-ordinating data collection from a range of services for people within the council or for partner organisations.”

Debbie says one of their key aims was to improve information management and to ensure that the most up-to-date data, from the right sources was being used. The Unit started to develop a business case for an LIS and created a project group consisting of key strategic partners from across the city. The business case was signed off in September 2010 and the Unit set about a tender process. After assessing three bids InstantAtlas was awarded the contract.

Read the full article

Cumbria Intelligence Observatory – ‘Bringing consistency to statutory assessment through online data visualisation’

Background

Cumbria County Council has been using InstantAtlas to develop interactive online reports that have been used to support work around statutory assessments. Rebecca Raw is Research, Information and Intelligence Officer within the Performance & Intelligence Unit at the council. Several years ago the team was asked to put together area profiles that could be used by council officers to better understand the profile of local areas. Data was collected and presented in spreadsheets. However, as Rebecca explains: “we found that circulating complex spreadsheets was not ideal”.

 “Through our involvement with the Cumbria Intelligence Observatory project we discovered that Cumbria PCT was using InstantAtlas and there was a strong feeling amongst Observatory partners that we should do the same.”

Read the full article

East Riding Data Observatory – Supporting the localism agenda in the East Riding of Yorkshire through a data presentation initiative

Background

The East Riding Observatory is an online resource that provides easy access to population, economic, community safety, health and education data for local authorities, partner agencies and communities across the East Riding of Yorkshire. The East Riding Data Observatory is a member of the Humber Data Observatory Group. Other Observatories in this group are: North Lincolnshire Council, North East Lincolnshire and Kingston upon Hull.

Gareth Hughes is senior research officer at the Observatory. He explains that Regional Improvement and Efficiencies Partnership (RIEP) funding was made available and Humber Data Observatory Group members were asked to highlight areas for investment.

Read the full article >>

Poole Partnership | ‘Providing an information resource to help commissioners of childrens’ services address local priorities’

Background

Poole Partnership is the Local Strategic Partnership for Poole. It involves community, voluntary and faith groups, working together with businesses and the public sector. It  aims to achieve long-term improvements to the quality of life for people living in Poole.

We spoke to Sara Ireland, Senior Research Officer, about the project. “It originated from work with a children and young people’s dataset that we had been working on for a number of years. We realised we were sitting on a large amount of information and were only able to do a limited amount with it – so we wanted to find a way of getting it into the public domain in a friendly format,” she says.

Read the full article >>

Image Credit – Jim Linwood

New TalkLIS interview with Suffolk County Council

“In the third in our Talk LIS series, Julian Tyndale-Biscoe discusses the future of LIS initiatives with Lyn Baran, Group Manager, Business Development, Suffolk County Council and the important role that communities will play by being able to interact with their LIS and include their own specific local information.”

OCSI Data Packs help Facts about Coventry improve local public services

Facts about Coventry – some background

Coventry’s Local Information System, ‘Facts about Coventry’ (http://www.facts-about-coventry.com), was set up in November 2010 by the Coventry Partnership. It set out to offer citizens and service providers a single point of reference for information about the public services people use, and background contextual information about the place itself.

Facts about Coventry primarily aims to ensure Service Managers can improve services through better access to better data. However, the system also serves a wider range of users, including local councillors, civil society organisations or members engaged in the Big Society, local businesses, those with an interest in public issues, students with projects, teachers and more. We talked to Tim Healey, Corporate Research Officer for Coventry City Council to find out more about how they are using Data Packs.

Launching Facts about Coventry

Unlike many Local Information Systems, ‘Facts about Coventry’ was not built on an existing system, but was built from scratch. Before the development of this system, the different departments within the authority were used to collecting and presenting their data in different ways from one another, with no integrated system in place. Faced with this problem at the inception of ‘Facts about Coventry’, developers decided the best approach was to buy a system using ‘off the peg’ solutions.

After an extensive review of the range of products available, Instant Atlas Server (http://www.instantatlas.com/iads.xhtml) and OCSI Data Packs (http://www.data-packs.com) stood out as offering the best solutions. Data Packs were selected due to the comprehensive range of public domain data and reporting they made instantly available, and because they were prepared in a way that enabled the user to load them directly into the Coventry system in a format readily processed by Instant Atlas.

Benefits of Data Packs for Coventry

A powerful tool for service managers

Facts about Coventry has proved to be useful to all Partnership data teams and service managers. As Tim explained, it is standard practice in Coventry for service providers to collect and analyse local service information. The contextual information provided by Data Packs is now used to support and strengthen this local data and has enabled service providers to deepen their analysis.

Read the full article

 

Watch the latest InstantAtlas Essentials Tutorial #17
How to configure a component to be a pop up window

Video Transcript below

Today I would like to show you, how you can make a component of your dynamic report to be a pop-up window that can be toggled on and off using a button.

To demonstrate this, I will use this example report. This report is as it comes out of the Publisher – nothing has been changed yet.

Now let’s say I would like to make the Time Series Chart a pop-up window. I would maybe want to do this if a component is not primarily important for the report or if I am running out of space to display all components next to each other.

I will open the config.xml file in the InstantAtlas Designer, select the component I would like to make to a pop-up window – in my case the Time Series Chart – and tick the checkbox of the property ‘PopUp Window?’. There is another property called ‘PopUp Window Visible?’ which allows me to define if I want the component visible when I open the report or if it shall be hidden on start-up. I want it to be hidden initially, so I leave this checkbox unticked.

Now I need a button to be able to toggle the component on and off. I will insert a new button via ‘Insert’ – ‘Button’ and give it a label e.g. ‘Time Series’. In the URL field of the ‘Links’ tab I now have to call an ActionScript function. This has to start with “script:” followed by the appropriate function name. The Designer section of the InstantAtlas Desktop User Guide lists all available ActionScript functions but I can also find the name of the function of I select the Time Series Chart again and hold my mouse pointer over one of the two pop-up window properties. The tooltip that appears will tell me the correct ActionScript function, in this case ‘toggleTimeSeries’.

So I go back to the new button und write exactly this function behind the ‘script:’. Please note that the function names are case sensitive.

I can now save my changes and refresh the report in my browser window. Initially I don’t see the time Series chart but when I click on the Time Series button, I can toggle the component on and off.

By the way: The data explorer is by default set up as a pop-up window which is toggled using the ‘Data’ button. If you would prefer to have the Data Explorer as a static component rather than a pop-up window, you can simply delete the ‘Data’ button and untick the ‘PopUp Window?’ property in the Data Explorer Properties.

If you experience any difficulties in setting up your own pop-up windows, or if you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact support@geowise.co.uk.

How Somerset Intelligence Network is using data presentation to explain community profiles to a wide user audience

Background

The Somerset Intelligence Network (SINe) aims to gather and use intelligence effectively to support policy-making and improve the quality of life for people living in the county of Somerset. SINe is part of the South West Observatory and is co-ordinated by the Partnership Intelligence Unit (PIU), based at Somerset County Council – a strategic partner. The website (http://www.sine.org.uk) is a public portal to SINe and the Observatory. It acts as a first point of access for people and organisations looking for data, information and research about Somerset at a range of geographical levels.

We spoke to Mike Smith, information manager with the PIU. He says that one of the issues identified early on was that individual partner organisations each had their own data sets but there was little coordination in terms of bringing them together. A team was set up to collate data sets and disseminate them which is now being done via a microsite called INFORM Somerset. This provides an overview of Somerset based on a range of themes including health and wellbeing and crime and community safety.

Getting started

Once staff for the PIU was recruited, it started to look at how other organisations were disseminating data and it was quickly recognised that a data visualisation package was needed. After going out to tender, InstantAtlas was selected as the preferred provider and the decision was taken to have a hosted solution.

Read the full article >>

Visualising the Index of Multiple Deprivation with InstantAtlas

The government’s Indices of Deprivation were published last week, including the overview Index of Multiple Deprivation 2010 (IMD 2010) which is used very widely to target programmes and resources to tackle inequality and deprivation. The IMD is an important measure of how local areas compare with others on a comprehensive basket of deprivation indicators – so provides a key input to understanding “need” for service commissioning.

Our colleagues at OCSI have been busy providing the IMD data to Data Packs users (http://www.instantatlas.com/data_packs.xhtml), and have written about why the IMD is still important in the open data era (http://www.ocsi.co.uk/news/2011/03/24/why-the-imd-is-still-important-in-the-open-data-age/), some headline findings (http://www.ocsi.co.uk/news/2011/03/24/headline-results-from-the-indices-of-deprivation-2010/), and links to commentary and visuals (http://www.ocsi.co.uk/news/2011/03/29/visualising-the-indices-of-deprivation-2010/). Some of these were picked up by the Guardian DataBlog (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/29/indices-multiple-deprivation-poverty-england).

InstantAtlas users have of course already started visualising the datasets, including:

• Coventry: http://ias.facts-about-coventry.com/IAS/dataviews/report/fullpage?viewId=236&reportId=234&geoId=7&geoSubsetId=199&geoReportId=7774
• Cornwall: http://www.cornwall.gov.uk/deprivationmap
• Nottingham: http://www.nottinghaminsight.org.uk/IAS/dataviews/report?reportId=383&viewId=992&geoReportId=26806&geoId=5&geoSubsetId=
• Kirklees (using the older IMD 2007): http://www.kirklees.gov.uk/community/statistics/deprivation/report/2007/atlas.html

As a free offer to all InstantAtlas Server users, OCSI are offering the IMD data for your area, formatted to load straight into your IAS.

Get in touch with Emma James at OCSI (emma.james@ocsi.co.uk, 01273 201 345) for details.

Suffolk Observatory ‘Bringing partner organisations closer together through a shared intelligence platform’

Background

The Suffolk Observatory is a partnership between Choose Suffolk, Suffolk County Council, Suffolk’s District and Borough Councils, NHS Suffolk and Suffolk Police. It is the home of data, statistics and reports about Suffolk provided by partner organisations. Data is presented around the key themes of education and skills, economy and employment, health and care, population, deprivation, housing, environment, transport and travel and crime. All areas of the county are covered, right down to district, ward and parish level, with information easily accessible in a variety of formats.

The Observatory is designed as a resource for anyone writing reports and presentations as well as those helping to inform strategic and business planning, prepare funding applications, or support academic research.

Lyn Baran is Group Manager, Business Development, Suffolk County Council. She says the initial impetus for the Observatory was the joint strategic needs assessment (JSNA). “We started to think seriously about the idea back in 2008. At that time there were a lot of barriers that were either real or perceived as to why it could be difficult,” she says.

As a small team that was being asked to service the intelligence needs of the partnership Lyn says that it wasn’t always easy to reach consensus between the partners and so Lyn wrote a proposal with a three-pronged approach to moving ahead. First Lyn suggested creating a data-sharing protocol to address concerns that had already been raised. Second was to build an intelligence sharing network to bring together analysts and researchers with a shared interest in data and intelligence  and third was to develop a platform on which the intelligence could sit.

Getting started

“The reaction to my report was positive and in the first year we started to tackle information sharing by creating a protocol. We then started to build the virtual network of individuals who wanted to share and provide the information,” says Lyn.

When it came to the platform, Lyn says the usual approach would have been to develop the business case and then go out to tender. However, Lyn felt that a better option was to ask the social enterprise Choose Suffolk to continue to host the Observatory on behalf of the partnership. This meant that the project was handled and delivered in a different way than it would have been had the public sector been responsible. Data presentation was an integral part of the development and InstantAtlas was selected.

The team ran workshops with partner organisations to establish potential audiences and came up with three:

-       data practitioners

-       the public and other interest groups

-       internal audiences (such as managers and councilors)

Meeting the need

The partnership used a local company, Solstice, to design the Observatory website around InstantAtlas Server and the principle throughout was to make sure that intelligence could be made accessible to all and available at the lowest possible level. Lyn says this has always been the intention but now it supports the localism agenda.

Read the full article >>