… UK GovCamp 2012

(This post has sod-all to do with toilets, but this is where I blog, so..)

I went to UK GovCamp 2012. It was last Friday. People have been posting their Top 20 things that they took from the experience. This seems like a good exercise to make sense of it all. I’ll do 10, cause I ramble.

A bit about what UK Gov Camp is..

UKGovCamp 2012 is an event organised by enthusiastic people. It’s loosely described as being an (un)conference for people working in Government and IT.

I don’t work in either. 

I’ve also seen it described as ‘Public Sector and Technology’, which I prefer as ‘public sector service design’ we touch on through our people-centred design work at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. ‘Tech’ rather than IT also feels more open, as this covers community forums and online networks and the way that the internet can aid communication and help communities become more inclusive. ‘IT’ sounds like a conference exclusively for web managers and people who program. 

It’s an un-conference because there’s no agenda or speakers or abstract submission or registration fee. At the start of the day, people (anyone who wants to, which ends up being about a third of the attendees) announce something they’d like to talk about, which is then assigned to a time and a room. In these rooms, people interested talk about things. 

1. Go, even if you don’t know what it is. 

I went this year because I went last year.

I went last year because my twitter feed (lots of local government people and open data enthusiasts, because of my public toilet mapping) were getting REALLY excited about it. There were only 3 tickets left, so after frantically running round the internet going ‘but what the crap IS IT?’ I signed up feeling like a bit of a fraud.

It turned out to be useful, but even if it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered – there are 200 people, so no one will notice you if you don’t want them too.

2.  If you think someone should be at ukgovcamp – invite them.

… Analysing London

Using information from council websites, I made some maps to show the varying numbers and types of toilet across London, from public toilets and community toilet schemes to other publicly accessible toilets (in Stations etc..). That was yesterday’s blog post.

It revealed as much about the levels of information on council websites as much as it did about the number of toilets. With that in mind, I’m going to milk the data a little more, to see what else it can reveal.

Population

I downloaded a pretty cool dataset called ‘London Borough Profiles’ from the GLA’s London Datastore (though I only ended up using the population data)

Firstly, here’s a map of population by borough.

(Link to actual map)

I’m quite surprised. I knew Wandsworth (where I live) has 300 000 residents, but I didn’t know that this was nearly twice as many as neighbouring Hammersmith & Fulham.

Clearly Wandsworth should have more toilets than Hammersmith & Fulham..

..but how many toilets is enough? 

… Council Websites (London)

I’ve made a graphical map of public toilets in London by using the information given on council websites.

This is a screenshot, because I can't embed for toffee.

You can view the actual map (it’s ‘clickable!’) here. It has labels to show which council is which. You can also Download the Data (.xls)

It says as much about council websites as it does about toilets.

For example, the 4 ‘white’ areas show councils with ‘No Toilets’. That’s because they don’t have a public toilet webpage. They may have squillions of toilets, but like the proverbial tree in the forest – if a public toilet isn’t listed on the council website, does it really exist?

… Local Directgov

Local DirectGov, who are a central place that people can go to to search for local (government) services, have made a widget that allows you to ‘locate public toilets’ by typing in a postcode. In return it gives you a link to the council webpage for public toilets for the area that the postcode falls under.

Now, copy and pasting the html for that widget into my blog (post) doesn’t work (though I’m sure the widget does) which is a damn shame as I’m only writing this post as an excuse to try it out. However I don’t know html so beyond copy/paste there’s not much I can do about it.

Here’s a picture of it instead:

If you go to http://mycouncil.direct.gov.uk/index.html you can try the search for other council functions, or if you want to try adding ‘locate toilets’ or something else to your own site, you can try it yourself at http://innovate-apps.direct.gov.uk/widgets/localservices/

In any case, the toilet widget only works for postcodes in… London.

Here’s why.

Local Directgov don’t have the links to all the council webpages for public toilets. They never asked the councils for them and the councils never provided them.

… The Great British Public Toilet Map, v.1

We made a first version of The Great British Public Toilet Map.

Click on the map to go to the website.

It’s not really a toilet map.

It will be, when there’s more data (initially for London – this link tells you why). At the moment, it’s more a way of seeing the data that’s available, and asking for more.

… more from Ordnance Survey

I’ve just had another reply from Ordnance Survey, which I think, due to its clarity, draws a line under something – namely councils publishing the OS public toilet point data as OpenData, even though the council know where their toilets are, and, indeed, put them there in the first place.

(unless you choose a different interpretation of the licence, which is none of my business.).

I’ve published their response first, as it’s more interesting. My email that they’re responding to is afterwards, and a little grumpier than I care for.

… more Open Data Councils

I’ve been doing some housekeeping

Namely making a spreadsheet of all the councils that I’ve contacted to ask if they would be able to make a dataset of info about their public toilets (location, opening hours etc) so that people who wish to make maps and apps to find toilets can make better ones.

I gave myself a fighting chance by only contacting councils that already publish some other free-to-use datasets (‘open data’) on their web pages, based on this list at openlylocal.com.

Anyway, here’s my spreadsheet for anyone into these things.

It’s interesting (no, really) because I included notes about the councils’ responses.

Link to my public toilet open data spreadsheet in Google Docs. 

I’m trying really hard to focus on all the helpful councils that created data or even explained forlornly why they could not. 

… Ordnance Survey’s Reply

I never said where I got to with Ordnance Survey.

There’s a good reason. I don’t really know.

I never did figure out how to embed the OS OpenData maps into WordPress. To be fair, I didn't try very hard. It just looked too difficult. Sorry Paul...

In March I wrote a blog post about how Ordnance Survey’s licensing rules were inhibiting my plan for local councils to publish data on where their public toilets are. You can read it here.

*Most* councils (i.e. all but one of my acquaintance) said that they weren’t allowed to publish the locations of their public toilets by giving Latitude/Longitude co-ordinates, because this information came from their internal mapping systems (‘GIS’) which Ordnance Survey provided, and own.

The toilet data itself is part of the ‘Points of Interest’ dataset, provided to Ordnance Survey by an external company called Point X.

Most of Point X’s data is provided by Ordnance Survey.

*flounces*

So. Any council that provides toilet data would have to do so by going the extra mile. This would mean replotting data on Google Maps or similar, or going out and finding the location data of public toilets themselves using a GPS. Basically, do something less convenient than they would like to. Which in the under-funded world of local government feels like a bit of a killer.

But like I said, one council did think that OS would allow it. So I concluded that “the only way that I can see to solve this is to get confirmation one way or the other from Ordnance Survey themselves.”

………………

With help from the very helpful Paul Beauchamp on Twitter (who’s Twitter bio lists him as a member of the Award-Winning PR and Comms team at Ordnance Survey, and I can see why!), I got a couple of answers.

… Ordnance Survey

I don’t know how actors do it.

Having to play emotional scenes where you cry-on-demand must be incredibly challenging. I don’t know anything that is soooo upsetting that it would squeeze real tears from my eyes just by thinking about it.

That is, until I started looking at Ordnance Survey Licensing Agreements.

(This is a screenshot of Ordnance Survey’s ‘open’ maps for public use. It’s a screenshot because there aren’t simple instructions to embed it in a free WordPress blog. What’s more, the ‘public use’ maps aren’t relevant to this post, and (still) don’t show the public toilets. But it Looks Pretty.)

This trauma began a month ago when, in my innocence, I tried emailing some more ‘open councils’ from the OpenlyLocal.com Scoreboard. These new councils had just published a few bits of spending-related data, but no school locations, no library locations, no ‘dataset of the location of the 120 000 lampposts in Lesser Hampton’, and certainly no toilets.

[Context: In order to make The Great British Public Toilet Map I'd like councils to publish information on where their toilets are as 'Open Data', meaning the type of file that anyone can download ('open') and that's compatible with computer-programming ('data').

To you and me it would look like this...

OpenData .csv file for (doomed) Manchester Public Toilets

...which might not look that exciting, but magical computer programs could join together all 300-odd local council datasets and display it on one map!

This would make it easier for people to find out where public toilets are (and if they're open and what facilities are provided) without having to check 300-odd council websites]

So, I asked these new ‘open’ councils if they’d considered publishing open data for public toilets and sent my email to the attention of their web/data enthusiast (who doesn’t have one of those?!)

In return I got lots of replies from very nice GIS managers explaining that this was not possible. Or, more to the point, not legal.

Eek.

But why?

… Open Data Councils

In December and January I contacted the most open data friendly councils to ask them of the possibility of adding open data on public toilets.

An ‘Open Data Friendly Council’ was determined by OpenlyLocal.com’s UK Councils Open Data Scoreboard, which at the time stood at about 40 ‘truly open’ councils (although I skipped the County Councils (not responsible for toilets) and a couple others (data newbies))