Intelligent Impact: Evaluating an open data capacity building with voluntary sector organisations

[Summary: sharing the evaluation report (9 pages, PDF) of an open data skills workshop for voluntary sector organisations]

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Late last year, through the CSO network on the Open Government Partnership, I got talking with Deirdre McGrath of the Your Voice, Your City project about ways of building voluntary sector capacity to engage with open data. We talked about the possibility of a hack-day, but realised the focus at this stage needed to be on building skills, rather than building tools. It also needed to be on discovering what was possible with open data in the voluntary sector, rather than teaching people a limited set of skills. And as the Your Voice, Your City project was hosted within the London Voluntary Services Council (LVSC), an infrastructure organisation with a policy and research team, we had the possibility of thinking about the different roles needed to make the most of open data, and how a capacity building pilot could work both with frontline Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations, and an infrastructure organisation. A chance meeting with Nick Booth of podnosh gave form to a theme in our conversations about the need to focus on both ‘stats’ and ‘stories’ ensuring that capacity building worked with both quantitative and qualitative data and information. The result: plans for a short project, centred on a one-day workshop on ‘Intelligent Impact’, exploring the use of social media and open data for VCS organisations.

The day involved staff from VCS organisations coming along with questions or issues they wanted to explore, and then splitting into groups with a team of open data and social media mentors (Nick Booth, Caroline Beavon, Steven Flower, Paul Bradshaw and Stuart Harrison) to look at how existing online resources, or self-created data and media, could help respond to those questions and issues. Alex Farrow captured the story of the day for us using Storify and I’ve just completed a short evaluation report telling the story in more depth, capturing key learning from the event, and setting out possible next steps (PDF).

Following on from the event, the LVSC team have been exploring how a combination of free online tools for curating open data, collating questions, and sharing findings can be assembled into a low-cost and effective ‘intelligence hub‘, where data, analysis and presentation layers are all made accessible to VCS organisations in London.