Tom Steinberg's Data Briefing at Breakfast Time for mySociety
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Almost every data-rich organisation now makes its data available online, and printed statistical publications are slowly disappearing. Countless technologies and approaches are available to enable organisations to tidy, publish and visualise data. But many organisations are on a learning curve, trying to work their way through what can be an intimidating thicket of buzzwords and big claims. What is the best way of presenting and sharing data to meet your organisation’s goals? Is more always better? In a world of limited resources, how to decide what to focus on? What are your users looking for and how can you meet their needs without spending a fortune? mySociety brings its extensive experience to help you answer these questions at our invite-only briefing session. The event is for executives working in organisations that collect and publish data, and does not require any technical knowledge (although if you are technical, we don't think you'll be bored).
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Tom Steinberg's Data Briefing at Breakfast Time for mySociety
- 1. making the most out of data, online @mySociety
- 4. -
- 13. Data is only worth collecting or using if it solves a problem
- 14. 1. can google users find clear answers to simple questions?
- 15. e.g.‘how much water gets leaked in the uk?’
- 22. 1. can google users find clear answers to simple questions?
- 23. Q2.When people who do know who you are want answers to questions, can they get them?
- 25. • Can you show me any copies ofWWI maps of Flanders you have? • Which brands that Which? reviews have been getting steadily worse over time? • What’s the trend in ‘Signals Passed at Danger’ on the East Coast line? • Can you play me a stream of all theTV shows that won awards last year?
- 26. data browsers
- 27. User centered design process
- 28. Q3. Can advanced users get at your data to do amazing, unforseen things?
- 36. • Who’s responsibility is it? • Do they have the skills & resources they need? • If not, what would have to change for them to have what they need? • What is the business case for giving them what they need?
- 37. Good data use is about solving problems
- 38. • Q1. Can Google users find clear answers to simple questions? • Q2.When people who do know who you are want answers to questions, can they get them? • Q3. Can advanced users get at your data to do amazing, unforseen things?
Editor's Notes
- Hello - I'm Tom Steinberg. I'm the Director of mySociety, and I want to start by thanking you all for coming here today. Today marks something new for mySociety - it's the first in a series of events in which we want to share our knowledge about the various ways in which organisations can really seize on the opportunities of the digital world. Our goal is to have everyone leave here with some really practical, useful questions that you can take back to your organisations to serve your clients or users's needs better. But first I'd like to start by telling you a bit about mySociety. We’re a social enterprise, which means that we are a registered charity that also offers commercial services., through a subsidiary called mySociety ltd. As a charity we run websites like this one -
- ... FixMyStreet, which is designed to enable and reassure the sort of people who have never ever even thought about reporting a broken street light that it is OK, easily and a legitimate thing to do. We do this by running a site and a series of apps that let people stick a pin into a map, write a few words about a problem, and the computer works out which one of 400+ local governments might be responsible, and sends the problem off for fixing. It’s been going several years and is now used to make nearly 100,000 reports a year. FixMyStreet basically embodies our idea that you can never do too much to make life easier for users. However although we started as a charity, over the years mySociety has been asked on a great many occasions to bring this sort of user-centered design approach to other people’s problems. So we now operate as a social enterprise, making about two fifths of our money from helping clients, whilst the majority comes now largely from big american philanthrophic organisations like Google.org and the Open Society Institute. And what sort of thing do we do for clients? Well, this sort of thing...
- What you’re looking at here is map a fire insurance association. This is the north of London, and the white areas represent everywhere you could get 4 fireengines to in under 10 minutes, if you needed to. It’s used to work out where it is and isn’t safe to put things like big factories. We also build apps for people like channel 4, problem reporting systems for the NHS and do lots of ‘how to get digital’ consulting for organisations of different kinds. But that’s enough background, because you’ve come along to hear about data. And if I’m not wrong I’d say that in 2013, a group of people coming to a presentation about data might well be expecting to learn about things like this...
- This wonderful splodge of lines and colours is a network diagram of the interconnections in a social network. The computing power required to do this a few years ago would simply not have existed, and so you couldn’t see this cool new way of looking at a group of friends or colleagues.
- Or you might have expected this gorgeous shapes and colours - this time showing data about the connections between desease outcomes in women’s health. Again sourced from huge amounts of data, and rendered using cutting edge techniques.
- But even those techniques aren’t as cutting edge as ones that literally let you fly over your data, as if in an aeroplane. Here’s some ticket sales data from Seattle, rendered in interactive 3d. So there’s three examples of how awesome data visualisation can look like in 2013, and the sort of stuff you might we be hoping to learn about today. There’s only one problem, though, with teaching you about these advanced, beautiful techniquess, though, a problem you you might already have guessed...
- And the problem is that most of this sort of very pretty, very impressive stuff is a load of old cobblers. Or young cobblers. But cobblers anyway. Why do I say this? Well, it all boils down to the following question - could you actually get anything from those graphics? Did you learn anything? I’m guessing you didn’t and that’s because this sort of production is just the 21st century version of that most familiar and timeless of human sins... (Image credit Sebastian Dooris: www.flickr.com/photos/sebastiandooris/3177131576/)
- ... putting style above substance. Because there’s no doubt the things I showed you are very pretty. And being pretty they have been attracting a lot of coverage from the sort of places that like pretty things (or pretty people) like magazines.
- So for example the coffee table book market seems to lap up these things... (Image credit David McCandless http://www.flickr.com/photos/25541021@N00/4340444304/)
- And there are big big books on big big data…
- And even four years ago the BBC produce a beautiful but entirely spurious TV show called Britain from Above, which was essentially just an excuse to show swooshing, pulsating lines racing across great britain. And if you’re in the business of making beautiful things for a living, there’s absolutely no sin in this ‘data as art’ approach. A lot of this stuff really is lovely - here’s one of my favourites, fake watercolour maps of the world from my friends at Stamen in San Francisco.
- there - undeniably lovely, if not exactly useful if you’re trying to find anything But those of you who’ve been invited today, I believe most if not all of you are not in the business of creating art projects. You’ve got organisations that supply important services to people who really need them. And you need to be using your data as well as possible to do this. But in a world with so much instant beauty, keeping focussed on why data really matters can be tough. And because it’s tough, I want to leave you with just four things today. One message and three questions you can take back and ask in the contexts of your own organisations.
- The message is this .... [caveat - unless you’re a data artist] I can’t stress how basic and helpful a founding principle this is if you want to make good use of data in the future. You can even print out this slide and stick it on the wall, whatever, this is the basic bottom line of good data usage. If you can’t name the problem you’re trying to solve with a data project, you should probably put down the data you’re looking at, and go back to figure out what problem you’re trying to solve in the first place. mySociety’s specialist skills lie in helping people to identify what problems might solved through a smart use of data, and then helping to actually build those solutions, which can sometimes be techically demanding. Because that is - I think - our specialism, I’ve split the rest of this presentation into three questions, all of which have been drafted to help you work out what problem you might need to solve, in a way that uses data online. I’ll repeat the questions again at the end, but the common theme is that they’re all about helping you to make your own organisation better at solving problems.
- ... about data that you hold. So what this question means is ‘can people who have never even heard of your organisation get an answer from you when they type a question into google’. Here’s a concrete example.
- Here’s the sort of question that anyone from a journalist to a company CEO to a GCSE student might want to know the answer to
- And, hooray, because we live in a rich, mature, high functioning democracy, there’s a big bit of government which keeps an eye on exactly this question, with an annual budget of over 17m pounds. But let’s imagine that I don’t know about them. What will I do?
- Well, I’ll go to Google and put the question in. And hooray, there are lots of answers. But none of them - not one - is from Ofwat, who paid all that money to collect the data? Why not - because like many institutions Ofwat hasn’t taken the steps required to appear high on those listings, so all its work is seen through the lens of others. It’s all intermediated. And why isn’t there an answer there? Beacuse as of today there simply isn’t a page on the Ofwat site that matches this query closely, that is well designed, and has the right data clearly expressed. There isn’t, basically, a page like this:
- This is a mockup we made, and from what we know about Google we’re pretty sure that if Ofwat was running this page, they’d soon rise up those rankings.
- You might think that it would be odd for a large institution to not have clear, plain english, up to date answers to these sort of questions that people type into Google, but it’s actually so common as to be normal. In fact simply to show you some good examples I’ve had to stretch rather - here’s a small group in Chicago who run a single page that answer the question ‘what’s the rate of new business licenses in chicago?’ - as you can see things aren’t so good here.
- But there are at least some large institutions that get it right - if you google for ‘weather london’, as many ofyou probably do, the BBC does a good job at giving you an excellent page that answers your question.
- And just yesterday whilst trying to master my new Mac I googled for ‘where is the hash key on a mac’ and found that someone had set up this site... So this person has managed to work out what common questions people are going to pose, has built an appropriate page with a clear answer and a clear name, and they have triumphed (although I’m not sure why they built it!). But do you? Not sure what people want to know? 1 - Run some focus groups 2 - Use google keyword tool 3 - Ask your comms people why people phone up
- So to repeat what I said before - data can be used to solve many kinds of problems your organisation has. But in the internet era perhaps the most basic thing data can help do is make sure that people who need your help get your help, even though they may not know anything about who you are! So that’s question 1. And question 2 is a close cousin.
- You all work for big organisations. And that means there are plenty of people who do know who you are, and who hope that you can help them solve their problems. And often those people will wash up on your organisation’s front door - i.e your homepage - because they suspect you can help them answer some question, perhaps of a more tricky kind.
- And when I say a more tricky question, I don’t mean anything as hard as some of these...
- I mean straightforward but non-trivial questions like
- To help people with problems like this you need to be able to build tools that let people ask your website questions - just as they might ask you questions in an email or over the phone. Exit, show Shelter, show EscapeFlight show ???
- These sorts of things are powerful, but not as easy to build as pages with a single answer on them. To build the sort of data browsers I was just showing you’ll need a few things. But the most important is you’ll have to be willing to work closely with your users - to invite them in, develop prototypes in closely in conjunction, and take them along a journey. For many organisations thinking about a website like this - actually meeting and talking to the public - will be strange, but this is what a user-centered design process looks like. If you want to know more about this - Mike over here is an expert and will happily talk more. Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21218849@N03/7114277515/ Samuel Mann
- But I promised you three questions, and the third is perhaps the most challenging. In the first two questions I assumed that if you look hard enough, and ask enough questions then you’ll be able to find what questions people want to ask that you can answering, using your data. But the third question to take back to the office is dependent on an admission that we’re all imperfect, and that it isn’t possible to know every question that someone might have. The last decade has shown that there are thousands of cases where data that was collected for one reason was re-used by people for reasons that wenrn’t forseen, and I want to to give you some of these examples.
- This is Ernest Marples. He was postmaster general in the late 1950s, and he’s best known for introducing two staples of British life - the premium bond and the postcode. Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/70023venus2009/8392729898/ Postcodes are amazing things. You almost certainly know yours, a handy nugget of information, but when they were created they had only one role - to expedite the sending of post. Today, postcodes (and the database that says where they all are) could hardly be less about actual post...
- Here it is on a price comparison website - being used so that people can contribute ever more rapidly to the demise of hte postoffice, by buying cheap broadband.
- And here it is on the government’s own police.uk site, where entering in a postcode will show you crime maps of your area. Even the government has come a re-user of postcodes in ways that weren’t anticipated. But that’s just one example. Back when people started building airports, it was decided that it was important to electronically distribute information about planes landing and taking off, so that people would know when to turn up at an airport.
- Now such data is collected thousands of times a day by this site - FlyOnTime.us - so that people can work out which flights are more or less reliable. And it’s combined with weather data (originally published mainly to help people grow crops) to tell you whether a certain flight can cope with rain or snow.
- And even older data than that can have value. Ships used to keep logs to help them work out where they were going and what it was like. Now it turns out that ancient ships logs contain a global map of the climate, of great value to climate scientists. This website turns the process of typing all those old, decaying logs into a game for members of the public. As you can see they’ve done 20,000 pages already.
- And the oldest public sector data that exists in the country - even that can be re-used in ways that are unexpected by the original collectors. I’m not even sure that the people who wrote downthis data knew what a map looked like!
- So I hope you can see that data that you collect or publish for one reason can sometimes be used for other, highly imaginative purposes. But this can only happen if you collect and publish your data in certain ways - what’s known as publishing data in machine readable ways. This is a bit of jargon that means that when you publish some data, all the formatting is done so that that data can be easily sucked up by computers and turned into apps and so on. If you don’t produce mahine readable data - if you just publish pretty bar charts (which computers can’t read) or scan piles of old paper (which computers can’t read) , or even put out spreadsheets converted into PDFs (which computers can’t read), then you dramatically increase the chance that nobody will take your data and use it to solve problems you never thought of. Which would be a shame. Now, if you buy this argument - that you should produce data that can be re-used on other websites and apps - you might be wondering what data you should prioritise for this treatment. The simplest way I can suggest is that you ask people who care about you organisation, starting perhaps with the people who follow your social media accounts, and moving on to people who have been asking you for data through other channels. So for each of the three questions I’ve given you to take home, you may well (in fact almost certainly will) conclude that you’re not yet satisfying user’s needs. Don’t worry too much here, almost nobody who isn’t called Amazon or Google is, at this point in time. But if you decide that you’re not answering these audiences well, you might want to ask why that is. Here are some ideas.
- [read through] Normally, it will turn out that failures to exploit data simply come down to the fact that its not actually anybody’s job.