Sheffield ‘Data for Good’ Ideas Session

We want to start a city-wide ‘data for good’ movement in Sheffield (or whatever we decide to call it). We think it would be great for different people with a range of expertise to come together voluntarily on a regular basis to better understand the scale and nature of particular problems in the city (or beyond).

This would be done through delving into the available open data, analysing it in some way and then summarising what was found so that there is ‘fresh’ insight into the problem. And, importantly, presenting things in a way that can be understood and used by everyone to achieve social impact.

This could look like:

• A new open data set for community organisations to use in their funding bids to demonstrate how they have identified need in their community;
• An interactive map showing where all of the activity is happening across Sheffield in relation to a particular outcome – e.g. improved health and wellbeing;
• An infographic highlighting the gaps in community capacity across the city with regards to addressing an identified need.
• Or anything else we think is useful.

To get things going, we are proposing an initial get together at Good Things Foundation (https://www.goodthingsfoundation.org/) to talk through how we might make the above happen. We’ll provide the space and the refreshments if you’re up for sharing your expertise and opinions for a couple of hours to help us shape this idea collaboratively. We think the loose structure of this session will be:

• Who needs to be at these sessions?
• What should we call it?
• How long should these sessions be?
• How well defined does the problem need to be at the start?
• Do we need a defined output (e.g. a visualisation, map or list of relevant datasets) at the beginning of each session?