A new digital project shows the kind of enquiries that Bournville residents are making to the City Council on a daily basis. The Birmingham Civic Dashboard uses an online interactive map that allows residents to see local issues reported to the council such as housing repairs and anti-social behaviour.
The dashboard was funded through a grant from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts which supported local authorities to team up with local developers to produce open data projects with some of their data. Birmingham-based Mudlark worked with the council’s Digital Birmingham team to produce the website.
Mudlark director Charles Hunter said: “Building the Civic Dashboard with Digital Birmingham has been a fantastic opportunity for Mudlark and our interest in making datasets easily understandable, engaging and relevant.”
The website allows you to search on a constituency or ward basis. The data for the Bournville Ward shows that yesterday saw 68 contacts were made to the Council, of which 57 were by phone and only five were via email or the Council website. This is depsite the Council’s spending £2.8m in revamping their website in 2009. In May this year Deputy Leader of the Council Paul Tilsley, in praising the new website, said: “we know the improvements that we have made to the way citizens can access council services are the right way forward.”
The Dashboard aims to make public the data relating to issues people are reporting to the council. The belief being that when looked at on a map and in real-time the accumulation of data would provide and insight into the issues facing both the citizens of Birmingham and the council itself as it responds to the issues raised.
Each day’s data is also published as a spreadheet. We’ve republished yesterday’s data by way of an example.
[...] Bournville Village Blog post about the Dashboard (via [...]
In this piece you comment on the apparently few contacts coming into the council via the website. I suspect – and I have asked for confirmation from the dashboard team – that the data being used only captures transactions via the website, and not the information only website visits. If this is indeed the case, it will massively understate the volume of enquiries coming in through the website. Data from the Socitm Website takeup service, that monitors web takeup in a third of all councils, shows that fewer than 20% of enquiries are about anything ‘transactional’ (eg report a problem, pay ctax etc) and the actual volumes of transactions depend on the extent to which transactional facilities are actually available on the website.
That’s a useful observation Vicky. So the council website may still function to reduce personal enquiries or telephone calls to the council but there’s no real way to show that through the Dashboard (I guess it could only be through surveying we would know that).
Hello both
Yes, we do only show the calls that are raised within the database. This includes when somebody calls the contact centre to ask when their local swimming pool is open, for example. We do not capture when somebody has gone to the website to find out that information, neither do we capture it if they phone up and ask the pool directly.
I believe that we are being quite clear about what we are showing in our descriptions on the About page
and we are aware that what we are visualising is only a subset of queries that come in.
The city had been publishing its web stats but I believe that has stopped as it was felt to be uninformative.
I’m interested how we could try and extrapolate something meaningful from unique visitors, unique visits or page views in respect of providing information to the public. Any suggestions?
[...] had an early blog post from Dave Harte on the Bournville Village blog. This is gratifying, although I should also probably [...]