Our Organicity Experiment: Where does public sector money go?
Screenshot
Organicity encourages co-creating for smart cities through an exciting new set of tools for working with and sharing data. We were chosen as an experimenter to test out the platform with a project designed to improve understanding on public spending in London.
Back in February we shared our story so far and revealed the challenges we had encountered in enriching data through listing the government. Since then, we’ve been experimenting with Organicity tools to create data visualisations for our spend and tender data.
We uploaded spend and tender data on Organicity’s API and made it viewable by creating assets in the Urban Data Observatory. We’ve also used Tinkerspace to make an app to show exactly where money is being spent and tenders are being let all over London. Check it out here: http://tinkerspace.its.ltu.se/compositions/live/App_f5a0998851d1411fbdaba8ac5d6c8b68/001/index.html (this works best on a smart phone).
We’re now finishing our co-creation stage by working with SMEs and citizens to get feedback on our work. We will share these findings with Organicity so these tools can be enhanced for the future.
The thing we’ve liked most about working with Organicity was the opportunity to be part of a movement growing the data infrastructure of our city. We’ve been impressed by the variety of tools and the ways in which we can incorporate our data.
As this was an experiment, there are a few things we’d like to see in future to improve the tools and data on offer. We’d love the opportunity to include more historical data , at the moment we’ve included links in the app to our own sites so we can display historical data there, but it would be great to make this available on the Organicity platform.
Creating with Organicity threw up challenges in processing data and learning to use new tools, but we’re grateful we’ve had the opportunity to be part of this community and work towards making London a future-facing city.
