Contents 
 
 

About 5 

Acknowledgements 5 

Executive summary 6 

Introduction 8 
How we define public services 9 
Previous work on open data in public services 9 
Approach 11 
The public sector, and the policy areas it is responsible for, are complex 11 
The nature of data has changed, creating new possibilities 12 
Understanding the impacts of releasing open data 12 
Visualising public services as ecosystems 12 

Patterns of open data use in public service delivery 15 

The three patterns of open data for better delivery of public services 15 
Note on visualisations 17 
Pattern 1: open data for increasing access to public services 17 
Example 1a. Transport for London release of transport data 18 
Transport for London – in a nutshell 19 
How open data supports the delivery of Transport for London’s services:  
benefits to the public sector 19 
Transport for London’s story 19 
Insights 20 
Example 1b. Leeds release of data in relation to bin collection 22 
Leeds Bins app – in nutshell 22 
How open data can support the delivery of waste management services:  
benefits to the public sector 22 
Leeds Bins app’s story 22 
Insights 23 
Example 1c. Famiio improving access to childcare and family service information 25 
Famiio – in a nutshell 25 
How open data can support childcare and family services:  
benefits to the public sector 25 
Famiio’s story 25 
Insights 26 
Pattern 2: open data for more efficient delivery chains and planning 27 
Example 2a. Local authority publication of spend data 28 
Spend Network – in a nutshell 29 
How open data supports the delivery of local public services:  
benefits to the public sector 29 
Spend Network’s story 29 
Insights 30 
 

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Example 2b. NHS publication of open data 31 

NHS open data – in a nutshell 31 
How open data can support the delivery of health services:  
benefits to the public sector 31 
NHS open data story 31 
Insights 31 
Example 2c. Urban Intelligence publishing local planning information 33 
Urban Intelligence – in a nutshell 33 
How open data can support the delivery of urban planning services:  
benefits to the public sector 33 
Urban Intelligence’s story 33 
Insights 33 
Pattern 3 – Open data for policy development 35 
Example 3a. The Department for Work and Pensions development of Churchill 36 
Churchill – in a nutshell 37 
How open data can support the delivery of DWP services:  
benefits to the public sector 37 
DWP Churchill’s story 37 
Insights 39 
Example 3b. Cabinet Office release of government grants data 40 
Government Grants Information System – in a nutshell 41 
How open data can support the delivery of grant-funded public services:  
benefits to the public sector 41 
Government Grants Information System’s story 41 
Insights 42 
Insights from examples 43 
Organisational collaboration 43 
Technology infrastructure, digital skills and literacy 43 
Foundational data infrastructure 43 
Open standards for data 44 
Senior-level championing 44 
Peer networks 44 
Intermediaries 45 
Problem focus 45 
Open innovation 45 

Recommendations 47 
Organisational collaboration 47 
Central government recommendation: fund public sector organisations  
to experiment with using open data to support the delivery of public services 47 
Technology infrastructure, digital skills and literacy 47 
Central government recommendation: train public sector staff how to use  
open data in public sector delivery 48 
Data infrastructure 48 
Open standards for data 48 
Senior-level championing 48 
Peer networks 48 

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Intermediaries 48 
Problem focus 49 

Next steps 50 

Learning materials 50 
Stimulus Fund 50 

Method 51 
 
 

About 
This report has been researched and produced by the Open Data Institute, and 
published in February 2018 as part of its project on using open data to deliver public 
services. Its authors were Ed Parkes, Therese Karger-Lerchl, Peter Wells, Jack 
Hardinges and Roza Vasileva. If you want to share feedback by email, develop the 
thinking in your national context, or would like to get in touch, contact the team at 
[email protected]​.  
 
To share feedback in the comments, highlight the relevant piece of text and click the 
‘Add a comment’ icon on the right-hand side of the page. 
 
The report is part of a wider project on new service delivery models, which aims to 
improve understanding of how to implement data-enabled service delivery models in 
government, and how to publish more open data as part of these approaches.  
 

Acknowledgements 
We would like to thank Emma Doyle, Gary Todd, Ian Makgill, Rikesh Shah, Ryan Dunn, 
Thom Townsend, Tom Forth, Yeonhwa Lee and their teams for the interviews and 
workshops, which were essential for this research and report. 
 
Pia Waugh, Paul Maltby, Professor Lucy Kimbell, Leigh Dodds, Bill Roberts, Louise 
Downe and Martin Jordan also contributed to discussions that helped to define our 
approach. We ran two workshops at Local Gov Camp 2017 and UKGovCamp 2018 and 
received many helpful contributions from participants. 
 
 
 

This is work in progress. It is likely to be updated as we 

  continue our work. Keep an eye out for updates! 

How can it be improved? We welcome suggestions from 

  the community in the comments. 

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Executive summary 
This paper explores how open data can be used in public service 
delivery and its potential for collaboration, joint problem-solving and 
open innovation. It highlights where open data has been released by 
public sector institutions and its effects on delivering public services  
 

The nature of the public sector is complex, as are the policy areas it is responsible for.  
At the same time, there are new possibilities presented by the changing nature of data.  
 
This paper encapsulates the ODI’s research into different ways of understanding the 
impacts of releasing open data for public services while capturing the complexity of 
delivering public services.  
 
We visualised open data within an ecosystem to identify open data opportunities in the 
public sector. By taking this approach, we developed three high-level patterns of open 
data use in public services. 
 

High-level patterns of open data use: 

 
● Pattern 1​ uses open data to increase access to services for 
citizens or organisations 
● Pattern 2​ uses open data to plan public service delivery and 
make service delivery chains more efficient; direct beneficiaries 
are commissioners, managers and frontline public service 
workers 
● Pattern 3​ uses open data to inform policymaking; direct 
beneficiaries are elected representatives, policymakers and 
citizens who want to influence policy 

 
 
We identify examples of each pattern and draw insights from their similarities. 
 
So far, we have developed practical recommendations for a range of actors to support 
greater use of open data to deliver public services.  
 

Practical recommendations for greater use of open 

data in public services focus on: 
 
● Organisational collaboration 
● Technology infrastructure, digital skills and literacy 
● Data infrastructure 
● Open standards for data 

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● Senior level championing 

● Peer networks 
● Intermediaries 
● Problem focus 

 
 
We will develop the methodology behind this report further as part of our wider project 
on new service delivery models, in which we are supporting four local areas in the UK to 
redesign a public service​ using open data.  
 
We will use our insights to develop learning materials to support those in the public 
sector to better use open data to deliver public services.  

   

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Introduction 
Many public services in the UK are expected to deliver efficiency 
savings along with improved outcomes for citizens. At the same time, 
public service delivery is increasingly interconnected with many 
organisations from the public, private and charitable sectors. To 
ensure effective and efficient delivery, we need to understand these 
links and interdependencies. 

 
Data is moving from being scarce and difficult to process to being abundant and 
easy to use. There are increasing opportunities to harness its value for economic 
and social benefit. Open data is ​data that anyone can access, use or share​. 
It drives innovation by and for government, individuals, businesses, startups 
and communities. 
 
We can see open data’s potential for transparency, economic growth and 
productivity in ​international open data for accountability initiatives​,1 ​open data 
startups​ and ​businesses improving processes with open data​.  
 
This paper describes how open data is used to deliver public services and the 
effects it has. We suggest a framework for understanding these impacts and set 
out ways in which others – from the public sector and beyond – can help 
develop this understanding.  
 
As part of its broader research project, the ODI is supporting ​four local areas in 
the UK to redesign a public service using open data​: Doncaster Metropolitan 
Borough Council, Kent County Council, North Lanarkshire Council and the 
London Borough of Waltham Forest.2 We opened an invitation to tender in 
summer 2017 and received 24 applications from consortia in the UK, ranging 
from community policing to public health, arts and culture. The responses 
demonstrated an appetite to innovate with open data in public service delivery. 
By engaging with teams going through service transformation, we hope to test 
some of the insights in this paper and develop our understanding of effective 
service patterns using open data. 
 
We are also analysing learning resources available to those in the public sector 
who design and deliver public services, to help them use open data to support 
their service. 

1
Open Government Partnership (n.d.), ‘Stories’, 
https://www.opengovpartnership.org/stories?country=0&type=0&theme=1196  
2
ODI (2017), ‘Four UK teams win funding to redesign public services with open data’, 
https://theodi.org/blog/four-uk-teams-win-funding-to-redesign-public-services-with-ope
n-data  
 

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While open data can support a variety of public services around the world, the 
scope of this report is limited to UK examples. This is because our methodology 
requires us to engage closely with those working in the public sector to 
understand the ecosystems they operate in. We will incorporate examples from 
other countries in future work. 

How we define public services 

We developed a working definition of a public service early on. This helped us to 
identify examples to examine in more detail. The definition is: 

“ 
 
A public service helps groups of people to fulfil a need, 
the ​ ​fulfilment of which is viewed to be in the public 
interest, and which public sector organisations recognise 
the need to provide. 

We settled on this definition for several reasons. We wanted to recognise a 

definition of public service which was as broad as possible, so we could capture 
the wider effects of open data, ie where data collected and published in one part 
of the system was used by another part of the system at another place and time.  
 
Our current definition focuses on the needs that individuals or groups of people 
have, as suggested by Cassie Robinson,3 as we did not want to align our 
definition too closely to the legal responsibilities that public sector organisations 
have. We wanted to recognise that – particularly in relation to services that rely 
on external organisations for their delivery and are not necessarily totally funded 
by government – there would not always be a distinct legal requirement for 
provision to a particular group. 
 
This definition is evolving and we will refine it further to make it more succinct.  

Previous work on open data in public services 

During our research we identified blog posts, reports and previous analyses on 
the use of open data in public services. There is quite a wide literature on the 
use of data in central and local government4 and the impacts of open data on 

3
Cassie Robinson (2017), ‘Putting users first is not the answer to everything’, 
https://medium.com/doteveryone/putting-users-first-is-not-the-answer-to-everything-dd
05b9f11b5  
4
Nesta (2016), ‘Wise Council: insights from the cutting edge of data-driven local 
government’, 
https://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/wise-council-insights-cutting-edge-data-driven-lo
cal-government  
 

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economic growth and innovation,5 but a relatively limited range specifically on 
open data and public services.  
 
This is a brief summary of those publications specifically relevant to the impacts 
of open data on public service delivery. 
 
Pia Waugh, who has worked for both the Australian and New Zealand 
governments, has outlined some effects of open data on public services in a 
number of blog posts and presentations, including this summary:6  
 
i) Efficiency  
 
Proactively publishing data that is commonly asked for in an automated 
way frees up resources. 
 
ii) Innovation  
 
Once data is published, so long as it is published well and kept up to 
date, other people and organisations will use the data to create new 
information, analysis and services. This innovation can be adopted by the 
agency, but it also takes the pressure off the agency to deliver all things 
to all people, by enabling others to scratch their own itch. 
 
ii) Improved services  
 
By publishing data in a programmatically accessible way, agencies found 
cheaper and more modular service delivery was possible through 
reusable data sources. Open data is often the first step for agencies on 
the path to more modular and API driven way of doing things (which the 
private sector embraced a decade ago). I believe if we could get 
government data, content and services API enabled by default, we would 
see dramatically cheaper and better services across all governments, with 
the opportunity for a public ecosystem of cross jurisdictional service and 
information delivery to emerge. 
 
In the UK, ​the ODI’s work with the Environment Agency7 has captured the 
benefits of releasing open data since the Environment Agency made their 
organisation-wide commitment in 2010.  
 

The impacts the Environment Agency identified at 

that point were: 
● Helping the Environment Agency to achieve its core objective 
● Saving time and resources 
● Building external relationships and getting the user-voice heard 
● Improving data quality and public perception 

5
This Google Doc contains links to papers on the economic potential of open data. 
This​ ​is not an exhaustive list but includes reports we considered during this project. 
Please get in touch if we missed any. 
6
Pia Waugh (2016), ‘Finding the natural motivation for change’, 
http://pipka.org/2016/02/21/finding-the-natural-motivation-for-change  
7
ODI (n.d.), ‘Benefits for EA’, ​https://theodi.org/ea-going-open-benefits-for-ea  
 

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● Better understanding and managing risks around data use and 

publication 
● Bringing diverse teams together 
● Working more easily and efficiently with external partners 
● Harnessing the power of the tech industry to make useful 
applications 
 

 
 
Another sector-focused study by GovLab examined the opportunity for open 
data use in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) in 2014.8 Along with 
exploring potential impacts of open data on the system, it set out a conceptual 
framework which could be used to help measure the impact of open data in the 
NHS.  
 
The report set out a logic model for open data in the NHS, described as: 
“The use of certain kinds of inputs and data, by certain kinds of users, for certain 
kinds of activities, will achieve certain outputs and outcomes that indicate 
impact. Specific methodologies will be used to collect and measure indicators, 
helping to assess impact.” 
 
The report also made recommendations for taking the agenda forward in the 
NHS, including to “develop an open health data ecology map, possibly using 
crowdsourcing, with a dictionary of all open health datasets used along with 
the variety of uses and users.” 
 
In summary, these previous pieces of work have begun to explore impact areas 
experienced by the public sector in releasing open data. Our work will expand 
on this by identifying particular examples and their shared characteristics so we 
can study in more detail how the release of open data will make public service 
delivery better. 

Approach 
From the ODI’s experience working with partners across multiple sectors – 
national and international, public and private – we have developed an 
understanding of how to build value on top of data. 
 
Value can be drawn from organisations that steward data (whether collecting, 
maintaining or sharing it), those that build data services, and those that use data 
and data services to make decisions.  

8
GOVLAB (2014), ‘The open data era in health and social care’, 
http://www.thegovlab.org/static/files/publications/nhs-full-report.pdf  
 

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The public sector, and the policy areas it is responsible for, 
are complex 

To understand how open data could be used in the public sector, we first need 
to understand public service delivery. Modern public services are complex and 
include an ecosystem of actors and organisations with different roles 
and responsibilities.  
 
There are various groups in the public service delivery system. This is especially 
true now that parts of the public sector are increasingly using organisations like 
outsourced contractors and charities to help deliver services.  
 
Meanwhile, there are more and different ways of funding these services – 
eg social impact bonds and other forms of social investment – which makes the 
picture of public service delivery complicated. Different parts of government 
have unique powers for tax raising, regulation and distribution of public funds. 
Add democratic oversight at a number of levels, such as central and local 
government, and this picture becomes more complicated still. 
 
In addition, public sector organisations are themselves facing complex issues. 
Childhood obesity, workforce planning, crime prevention and many other policy 
issues have different origins, and effective interventions are multifaceted and 
need a long-term approach and collaboration. 
 
To explain the relationships that support government service delivery, our 
approach must allow for complexities and interaction between those involved.  

The nature of data has changed, creating new possibilities  

Data is moving from being scarce and difficult to process to being abundant and 
easy to use. But harnessing its value for economic and social benefit – in ways 
that support innovation and deliver social justice – is hard. 
 
Data can enable us to innovate, create more efficient and effective services and 
products, and fuel economic growth and productivity. To bring about this future, 
we must make data as open as possible while protecting people’s privacy, 
commercial confidentiality and national security. We need to find the right 
balance for all societies and economies to feel data’s benefits fairly. 
 
This report is focused on open data. We have to start somewhere. We will 
expand our thinking about opportunities for public service delivery to include 
other ways of sharing data in the future. 
 
Open data offers a way of creating social and economic value from data in a 
changing environment. Open data is data that anyone can access, use or share. 
Anyone can use it as a resource for innovation. When data is published openly, 
others can use it and create value from it. We currently know less about creating 
value from open data than from historic methods of collecting and selling data. 

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A​ ​good understanding of data ecosystems and the benefits that open data 
creates in them can help to identify how value is created. 
 
By making data openly available while respecting privacy, the public sector can 
create a resource for external innovation and build ecosystems to help deliver 
public services. Those ecosystems will include public sector organisations, 
businesses, startups, individuals and communities.  

Understanding the impacts of releasing open data  

The ODI has been focusing on understanding the impacts of releasing open data 
for public services, while capturing the complexity of public service delivery. 
 
To enable the public sector to understand how open data can support public 
service delivery, we have looked for ways to make the mechanisms clearer and 
easier to experiment with. 

Visualising public services as ecosystems 

Because public service delivery is complex and processes are not linear, 
identifying impacts and beneficiaries is not straightforward. Impacts may not be 
easily understood, or may be indirect and take time to materialise. Visualising a 
public service as an ecosystem allows us to identify and be explicit about the 
impacts and who is affected, and helps us to understand the different types of 
value exchanged within networks of data publishers and users. We can then 
explain these impacts more clearly to the public sector and data holders, 
encouraging further release and use of open data. 
 
Visualisation brings sense to complex systems and issues across business and 
government. Government departments have created visualisations of 
ecosystems to help convey the overarching strategy and vision for an 
organisation.9 Maps of business processes and data collection help 
understanding of opportunities in government data collection.10 
 
Visualising and drawing are core approaches in ​service design​ and the ​UK 
Cabinet Office Policy Lab​ and academics such as Lucy Kimbell have pushed 
their use forward in a government context. Kimbell has provided a number of 
useful approaches to thinking about service design in the public sector and her 
methodologies have inspired the way in which we have conducted research for 
this project.11 
 

9
DWP Digital (2015), DWP’s 2020 Vision, 
https://dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk/2015/03/18/dwp-2020-vision-andrew-besford  
10
Michael Rose (2010), ‘The complications of a right to data’, 
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/hqYlWFPoX4yLbf?lipi=urn%3Ali
%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base_treasury%3B%2BUJNc%2BWdQT6UkBD
N9gziRQ%3D%3D  
11
Lucy Kimbell (2015), ‘Service Innovation Handbook’, 
https://serviceinnovationhandbook.org  
 

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Visualising service innovation ecosystems by showing how people, data, resources, 
firms and institutions are connected together now, or could be in the future.12  
 
 
In relation to open data specifically, members of the open data community also 
use visualisation of ecosystems.13 ODI Head of Data Infrastructure Leigh Dodds 
has been experimenting with ecosystem diagrams for open data as a way of 
exploring its effects.14 
 

12
A method used in Kimbell, L. (2014). ​Service Innovation Handbook​. Amsterdam: BIS 
Publishers. Illustration: Andrew Boag 
13
See: ​http://www.jargonautical.com 
14
Lost Boy (2017), ‘Some tips for open data ecosystem mapping’, 
https://blog.ldodds.com/2017/03/13/some-tips-for-open-data-ecosystem-mapping  
 

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There are a number of academic disciplines that visualise ecosystems and 
networks to bring insight to complex systems. In particular, a ​soft-systems 
methodology​ approach can be helpful in capturing people’s involvement in a 
system. Soft systems methodology is an approach to business-process 
modelling which is useful for general problem-solving and managing change.  
 
The system was developed to deal with “soft problems” – those where there are 
divergent views and where organisations and people are key parts – with lots of 
similarities with public sector systems. In addition, v​alue network analysis​ uses 
visualisation to understand complex economic systems. 
 
In our research, we experimented with a technique from soft-systems 
methodology called ​rich picturing​. When exploring an issue, we ran workshops 
with public sector groups working with open data, to visualise the relationships 
between organisations, technologies and datasets. 

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Patterns of open data use in 

public service delivery 
The following examples and analysis are our first attempt to describe 
specific impacts of open data on public service delivery. We are 
seeking input from within government and the broader open data 
community to help us identify and describe these impacts further.  
 
Those within the public sector are best placed to highlight the impacts of open 
data on public service delivery, and in many ways are the only ones able to 
describe them in detail. In many cases, there is a lack of transparency in the 
operation of public sector organisations. We need a detailed understanding of 
how services operate to begin to understand what effect data – open data in 
particular – has on the system. 
 
Following our initial research and interviews with experts, we identified examples 
to investigate in detail using our visualisation methodology. Given that we 
needed to engage with those working in the public sector in detail to understand 
the dynamics of public service delivery, we had to confine our analysis to UK 
examples for the time being.  

   

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The three patterns of open data for better delivery 

of public services 
We propose that open data can be used in the public sector to help deliver 
services in three ways. We call these “patterns” and have used them to group 
the examples in this work. 
 

 
The figure above shows that the patterns occur at different points of public 
service delivery, moving from direct impacts for the user (on the left) towards 
indirect impacts through better delivery and policymaking (on the right). 
 

High-level patterns of open data use: 

● Pattern 1​ uses open data to increase access to services for 
citizens or organisations 
● Pattern 2​ uses open data to plan public service delivery and 
make service delivery chains more efficient; direct 
beneficiaries​ ​are commissioners, managers and frontline 
public​ ​service​ ​workers 
● Pattern 3​ uses open data to inform policy-making; direct 
beneficiaries are elected representatives, policy-makers and 
citizens who want to influence policy 

 
 
 

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The graphic shows how these patterns vary in terms of direct beneficiaries, and 
that we think they differ in the types of open data currently released and used. 
For instance, in Pattern 1 we find more examples of rapidly changing data being 
used – such as that released by Transport for London (TfL) – than in those 
patterns targeted at civil servants (Pattern 3). 
 
Impact is not limited to direct beneficiaries. It can extend to many, if not all, 
of those who deliver and receive public services. This report focuses on the 
benefits generated from open data. We recognise that open data can also create 
risks or feedback loops that have negative impacts and that potential outcomes 
should be carefully assessed on a case-by-case basis. 
 
The following sections look at the dynamics of the patterns in more detail. 
In presenting the ecosystems, we also explain how each was developed. 
This offers insight into how these arrangements came to be, and highlights 
important aspects of how open data supports particular services that are not 
obvious when looking at the ecosystem drawings in a fixed state. 
 

Note on visualisations 
The ecosystem maps were initially drawn in workshops with those involved in 
delivering the service; we then redrew them and structured them according to 
the types of data, information produced and direct beneficiaries (as in the 
diagram above). Finally an illustrator designed some of the maps to bring out the 
actors and processes more clearly. Examples below have ecosystem maps 
across these stages attached to them, including hand-drawings and designed 
pictures, to showcase the methodology. Some of the ecosystem maps that we 
present are those we have developed with an illustrator, some are the drawings 
from the workshops and in some instances we have not presented ecosystem 
maps, as further work to understand the ecosystem is needed. 

Pattern 1: open data for increasing access to public 

services 
The first is perhaps the most well-rehearsed pattern, since it clearly sets out an 
open data “startup” story – where organisations delivering public services can 
release data and a startup can take it to develop a product or service. These 
examples tend to be of customer-focused and in-person public services. 
 

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Example 1a. Transport for London release of transport data 

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Transport for London – in a nutshell 

Transport for London (TfL) is a local government body responsible for the 
transport system in Greater London. TfL has the responsibility for London's 
network of principal road routes, for various rail networks including the London 
Underground, London Overground, Docklands Light Railway and TfL Rail, for 
London's trams, buses and taxis, for cycling provision, and for river services. 

How open data supports the delivery of Transport for London’s 

services: benefits to the public sector 

TfL is one of the UK’s leading open data publishers. With over 31 million 
journeys made in London every day,15 it has long recognised the need to make 
travel information readily available to passengers. Publishing open data is a 
central part of TfL's customer information strategy of providing real-time 
information that helps people to use their services – it enables them to provide 
information about service locations, routes and delays to passengers far beyond 
their own online and offline channels. 

Transport for London’s story 

Towards the end of the 2000s, TfL found that developers were scraping 
information about its services from its website. In an attempt to enable others 
to more easily display this information on their own websites and desktops, TfL 
launched embeddable widgets – including maps of its network and live travel 
news – in 2007. While TfL still makes a set of widgets available,16 the launch 
represented the beginning of a process in which the organisation would publish 
increasing amounts of data for others to access, use and share. 
 
Between 2007 and 2011, TfL introduced an area for developers on its website 
and openly published real-time transit data via a range of feeds and downloads.
17
This helped to satisfy a growing demand for its data among developers, who 
used it to develop user-facing journey planners and other applications. The 
anticipated influx of visitors to London during the 2012 Olympic Games was a 
stimulus for the introduction of live bus arrivals data, which led to a number of 
successful bus-only transport applications. Shortly after this came the launch 
of a new unified Application Programming Interface (API) for TfL’s website. 
 
The development of TfL’s unified API in 2014 and the decision to open it up to 
external users was an important step in the organisation’s open data journey.18 
Historically, the data it had published on different transport modes was made 
available in a variety of formats and structures, which made it difficult for 
developers to stitch together and develop multimodal applications (such as 

15
Transport for London (n.d.), ‘What we do’, 
https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/what-we-do  
16
Transport for London (n.d.), ‘Widgets’, ​https://tfl.gov.uk/forms/12425.aspx  
17
TfL also publishes open data related to transparency and accountability, such as 
details of its expenditure; this case study focuses on the organisation’s transit data. 
18
See: 
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/unified-api?intcmp=29422#on-this-page-0  
 

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those that enable users to plan a journey using both buses and the London 
Underground). The unified API presented the data in common formats (XML and 
JSON) and, for the first time, consistent structures. 
 
TfL’s open data now covers timetables, routes and lines, embarkation points and 
facilities, transit status, disruptions and works, and fares.19 According to recent 
research by Deloitte,20 in total there are over 80 TfL data feeds (75% of which 
are available via the unified API) and over 13,000 registered developers.21 Data 
users range from multinational technology companies to individual developers. 
The research has shown that TfL’s approach to open data is improving journeys, 
saving people time, supporting innovation and creating jobs. 
 
According to the Deloitte research, TfL open data is now used in over 600 apps 
(including journey planners, mapping tools, booking and scheduling tools, and 
analytics engines).22 42% of Londoners use an app powered by TfL data and 
passengers benefit from between £70m and £90m per year in time saved from 
using open data-powered applications to plan journeys more accurately. Up to 
£20m additional revenue is generated from increased journeys per year, driven 
by access to travel information, and £1m is saved per year by enabling external 
development of new customer-facing apps, rather than producing campaigns, 
systems and apps in-house. TfL save £2m annually by moving away from SMS 
passenger alerts and TfL open data currently supports 730 jobs, including those 
in new companies made viable through its availability. 

Insights 

Clearly describing the benefits of open data in relation to TfL’s wider 

organisational objectives has established a strong, ongoing case for its 
publication.​ ​Providing accurate and timely information to passengers is central 
to TfL’s ability to deliver its physical services – open data enables developers 
and other organisations to develop customer-facing tools that do this on a scale 
that TfL could not do alone. Efforts to establish the value of the benefits of TfL’s 
open data approach include the Shakespeare Review,23 which documented the 
approach in a case study in 2013, and the Deloitte research commissioned by 
TfL that has estimated the total value of open data to the organisation, 
customers and others to be in the order of £130m per year.24 
 

19
TfL Website (n.d.), ‘Our open data’, 
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/our-open-data?intcmp=3671  
20
Deloitte (2017), ‘Assessing the value of TfL’s open data and digital partnerships’, 
http://content.tfl.gov.uk/deloitte-report-tfl-open-data.pdf  
21
Note that TfL still supports the use of some data feeds and bulk downloads that 
preceded its unified API. In some cases, these contain additional data not yet available 
via the unified API. 
22
See Deloitte (2017), ‘Assessing the value of TfL’s open data and digital partnerships’, 
http://content.tfl.gov.uk/deloitte-report-tfl-open-data.pdf​ (pp 5, 9, 15) 
23
Gov.uk (2013), ‘Shakespeare review of public sector information’, 
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/shakespeare-review-of-public-sector-infor
mation  
24
See Deloitte (2017), ‘Assessing the value of TfL’s open data and digital partnerships’, 
http://content.tfl.gov.uk/deloitte-report-tfl-open-data.pdf​ (p 5) 
 

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Engaging with developers and other users has helped to build a vibrant 
ecosystem around TfL’s open data. Having begun with creating an area 
dedicated to developers on its website in 2007, TfL continues to engage with 
and provide support to users of its open data through hackathons, blog posts 
on its website, and other channels. In 2017 it launched the TfL Tech Forum and 
also ran a consultation focused on understanding how it could improve its 
open data publication.  
 
Publishing open data has supported conversations and partnerships between 
TfL and other organisations who hold valuable transit data. By making data 
available to others, TfL has benefited from engagement with companies such 
as Waze, Apple and Citymapper – some of which provide TfL with access to the 
data they collect. This includes data related to transport modes and areas for 
which it does not itself collect data (eg crowdsourced traffic incident data), 
giving TfL access to a rich source of data enabling them to better manage traffic 
in London than it otherwise could. 
 
A number of intermediary users combine TfL open data with data from other 
sources to create their own products and services. Organisations like ITO World, 
TransportAPI, Tom Tom and Elgin gather data from different sources to provide 
aggregated data feeds and additional services to developers and other 
organisations. This type of use demonstrates the need for transport data 
standards that allow interoperability – part of the value currently added by these 
intermediary users is to harmonise the data published by different transport 
operators and other organisations to make it easier to use and to develop new 
products and services.25 
 
As well as using open data published by TfL to increase access to the 
organisation’s physical transport network, some users are developing their own 
transport services. For example, CityMapper helps users make decisions about 
how to get from A to B in London using different modes of transport, which are 
managed and run by providers including TfL, Uber and Arriva. In 2017, 
CityMapper trialled the SmartBus, which uses data it collects on how users of 
its service move around the city to create the routes and timetables for the new 
SmartBus service. 
 

25
The ODI is currently working with a wide range of stakeholders to support the 
development of open data standards. This includes producing a case study focused on 
the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), which is a widely adopted standard for 
public transportation data. 
 

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Example 1b. Leeds release of data in relation to bin collection 

 
 

Leeds Bins app – in nutshell 

The Leeds Bins app is a mobile application that tells people who live in Leeds 
when their green, brown and black bins are due to be collected, and adds 
reminders to their calendars. The diagram above is an example of a 
work-in-progress version of an ecosystem map, displaying the actors involved 
in the service delivery. 

How open data can support the delivery of waste management 

services: benefits to the public sector 

Open data on bin collection routes and times is used to inform people living in 
Leeds when their bins are collected. The application adds bin collection dates 
to people’s calendars, reminds them the night before to put out their bin, and 
includes links to what to put in which bin and where to take items that cannot be 
put into bins. The reminders make rubbish collection more convenient for 
citizens, and publishing open data – instead of sending out letters – saves the 
council approximately £100,000 per year based on estimations by imactivate.  

Leeds Bins app’s story 

Leeds has long seen open data as a means of supporting local economic growth 
while dealing with substantial reductions in local government spending power. In 
2014, Leeds Council decided to invest significantly in making open data work for 

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the city. Leeds has a lot of digital talent and city leadership saw potential to 
showcase the city’s strengths to potential investors. 
 
In setting out the open data initiative, the council asked city departments what 
challenges they faced to consider how open data could help. The council 
assigned funding to encourage the release and use of open data to solve city 
challenges. The ​Urban Sustainable Development Lab​ was one the programmes 
funded. An innovation lab was set up to generate ideas and pilot them. Some of 
the funding for this came from the UK’s national “Release of data” fund with 
extra local funding boosting this.26 
 
Leeds’ open data platform ​Data Mill North​ hosted an event at ​ODI Leeds​, an ODI 
Node, with developers working with council departments – including office staff, 
frontline workers, and sometimes elected members – to consider how open data 
could be used for better service delivery. People working in waste management 
shared the problems they faced in their work, one being that people did not 
know when their bins were collected and were unhappy with the service as a 
result, and that the council had to mail out bin collection timetables either 
annually or twice-yearly, an expense that they increasingly could not afford. 
Data was made available for the event and developers built prototypes to 
address the identified problems. ​imactivate​, a small software company in 
Leeds and partner organisations of ODI Leeds, developed a Leeds Bins 
prototype, initially as a website. This idea and three others from the other teams 
of developers were presented to the waste management department. A winner 
was selected and the Leeds Bins team got the funding to develop what later 
became a mobile application, due to the difficulty and cost of updating 
Leeds City Council’s website. 
 
Bartec Auto ID​ manage the bin routes in Leeds and have software that manages 
their bin routes and sends and receives live updates. Data Mill North worked 
with Bartec Auto ID to release household bin collection data openly, and the 
council included the open release of the bin collection schedule in its contract 
with Bartec Auto ID.27 ​Future Cities Catapult​ had previously worked with Bartec 
Auto ID to develop a standard for publishing bin collection routing data, which 
was used for this project. Imactivate developed the ​Leeds Bins mobile 
application​ using the open bin route data. Uptake of the application has been 
fast and widespread, data on which is published openly.28  
 
The council uses open data on app usage to identify areas of low uptake, and 
has launched targeted initiatives to increase awareness of the application and/or 
promote other ways of informing people when their bins are collected, to reduce 
the risk of people without smartphones not receiving information about 
collection times. These targeted initiatives are more cost-effective than regular 
mail-outs. The open data on uptake allowed Leeds City Council to choose which 

26
Data.gov.uk (2014), ‘Release of Data Fund Update’, 
https://data.gov.uk/blog/release-data-fund-update  
27
Data Mill North (n.d.), ‘Household waste collections‘, 
https://datamillnorth.org/dataset/household-waste-collections  
28
Data Mill North (n.d.), ‘Leeds Bins app record of lookups’, 
https://datamillnorth.org/dataset/leeds-bins-app-record-of-lookups  
 

Open Data Institute 2018 / Using open data to deliver public services What data publishers need 23 
  
 

channels to prioritise. This decision is difficult because it involves weighing up 

needs and costs. Data can inform these decisions but the council ultimately 
needs to make them democratically. 

Insights 

Starting with the problem, in this case people not knowing when to put out 
which bin, and working closely with the local authority on solving it with open 
data, has proven helpful in delivering a better public service. The ongoing cost 
to Leeds City Council for this solution is about £1,500 per year, significantly 
lower than mail-out costs.29 imactivate and Bartech Auto ID are now selling the 
app to other councils, powered by open data where possible and by direct 
data-sharing between imactivate and Bartech Auto ID where open data is not 
preferred by the local government, or where opening the data adds 
unacceptable costs (eg PAF licensing).

   

29
Numbers are based on estimations by imactivate. 
 

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Example 1c. Famiio improving access to childcare and family service 

information 

Famiio – in a nutshell 

Famiio​ is planning to provide a platform for information on childcare and family 

services. Information on the platform will be available to the public, professionals 
and local and central government. Parents will be able to search and discover 
more than 500,000 services and activities across local authority borders in 
England; service providers will be able to promote their service offer effectively 
in one place; local authorities and commissioners will have access to better data 
more easily and cost-effectively, which in turn will help them to manage the 
childcare market and deliver “smart commissioning” of services. 

How open data can support childcare and family services: benefits to 
the public sector 

The UK Department for Education found that information about available 

services plays an important role in uptake of childcare by parents.30 The variety 
of services available and the number of different service providers can make it 
difficult for parents to understand what services they can use. Once launched, 
Famiio will improve access to the right services for families that need them. 
Local authorities will be better able to direct citizens to the right service by 
providing help better and earlier through Family Information Services and by 
targeting services.  
 
In addition to providing information on available services to parents, the platform 
will also publish this information openly, to be reused by commissioners for gap 
analyses, to assist grant awards, and to be used by third parties. Famiio has the 
potential to help local authorities save costs in their internal information systems 
as information will be more readily available and it may become easier to match 
families’ needs with the existing services. 
 
For parents not able to or interested in using the Famiio interface, Family 
Information Services will be able to use the application and continue to provide 
more traditional support to parents. (This highlights the need for infomediaries 
that produce non-digital information.) 

Famiio’s story  

Most local authorities have a Family Information Service that provides 

information to parents about childcare and family services, the provision of 
which is a statutory responsibility of local authorities under the Childcare Bill 
2016. In 2008, the government initiated a project to aggregate information 
on all services available to families, including services not commissioned by 
local authorities.  

30
Department for Education (2016), ‘Childcare and early years survey of parents 2014 to 
2015’, 
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/516924/
SFR09-2016_Childcare_and_Early_Years_Parents_Survey_2014-15_report.pdf.pdf  
 

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This information was shared publicly, but not as open data. In 2012, this system 
was closed down under austerity measures.  
 
Famiio was conceived to help parents access services across borders between 
local authorities and to protect family information from the uncertainty of 
government funding. 
 
Statutory guidance for local authorities from the Department of Education 
specifies how local authorities should share information on childcare and family 
services, and suggests that as far as is reasonably practicable, data should be 
published in a reusable and machine-readable format based on open standards.31  
 
Local authorities will be able to use the Famiio platform to meet this guidance 
and, once the data is aggregated into the platform, parents will be able to 
access it free of charge, while local authorities and service providers will pay 
a subscription fee. 

Insights 

Funding is an essential part of an open data project. The potential of Famiio for 
better childcare and family services can only be realised once the organisation 
receives funding. Access to funding may be particularly difficult for organisations 
outside of government. 

   

31
Department for Education (2017), ‘Early education and childcare. Statutory guidance 
for local authorities’, 
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/596460/
early_education_and_childcare_statutory_guidance_2017.pdf  
 

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Pattern 2: open data for more efficient delivery 

chains and planning 
In this second pattern, we identify examples of open data release supporting 
planning and delivery. The direct beneficiaries are likely to be those in public 
sector organisations commissioning services and those in external organisations 
involved in service delivery.  
 
These examples highlight the role open data can play in better coordination 
between the public and private or third sector organisations involved and making 
the delivery of public services more effective and efficient. 
 

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Example 2a. Local authority publication of spend data 

 
 

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Spend Network – in a nutshell 

Spend Network​ pulls together spending, contract and tender data published 
by local authorities and other organisations in the UK. The organisation then 
provides insight and consultancy services to potential service providers to public 
sector organisations, and provides similar services back to government. 

How open data supports the delivery of local public services: 

benefits to the public sector 

Open data published by government organisations is analysed and repurposed 

by Spend Network to provide analysis, which will help make delivery chains and 
relationships between suppliers and buyers more efficient. The same (closed) 
data is used to save public money and improve the quality of services delivered 
to citizens. 

Spend Network’s story 

Inspired by ​Windsor and Maidenhead Council​ – which had started to release 

details of their spending in 2008 – the UK government, as part of the 
transparency drive in the previous coalition government, set out expectations32 
of the spend and transparency data it needed UK local authorities to publish.33 
For instance, this set out that all UK Local Authorities had to publish all spending 
transactions over £500 and all Government Procurement Card spending and 
contracts valued over £5,000. The policy motivation for these commitments was 
to ensure that taxpayers could have insight into how public authorities were 
spending money. 
 
Supported by guidance produced by the Local Government Association,34 
some local governments began to publish this data in open formats. In addition 
to spending data, data on let contracts was also made available. 
 
The councils were required to publish the data on their websites. Spend Network 
began to pick up the data and aggregate it across many different UK local 
authorities. Spend Network was launched in November 2013 using open data to 
create the first comprehensive and publicly available repository for government 
transaction data, a market worth in excess of £130b per annum. Spend Network 
has published over 100m transactions, worth in excess of £3t. The company has 
grown out of Ticon, a small consultancy focused on government procurement 
and payments, founded by Ian Makgill. 
 

32
Gov.uk (2015), ‘Guidance Local government transparency code 2015’, 
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-government-transparency-code-201
5  
33
See ​The Guardian​ (2010), ‘Government data: full text of David Cameron's letter 
pledging to open up the datasets’, 
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jun/01/government-data-david-came
ron-letter  
34
Local Government Association (2015), ‘Local transparency guidance’, 
https://www.local.gov.uk/our-support/guidance-and-resources/data-and-transparency/l
ocal-transparency-guidance  
 

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Spend Network provides services such as procurement intelligence to both 

small and large businesses who are providers of services to local government. 
It is also involved in a data reseller market to large consulting firms who then 
offer services back to the public sector. 
 
Spend Network data is standardised and linked and can be used to compare 
between bodies, regions or sectors. The ability to compare can help with 
spotting patterns and anomalies, which can then be addressed to improve the 
delivery process. The data can also be used to compare between suppliers; 
for example, comparing prices can inform spending decisions and lead to more 
effective allocation of resources. 
 
Spend Network also provides a service to government by re-publishing the open 
data made available according to the ​Open Contracting Data Standard​ (OCDS). 
OCDS was created by the ​Open Contracting Partnership​ and is used in many 
countries around the world. This makes it easier to scale. The team behind 
Spend Network are now using the standard and their experience gained in the 
UK to expand their tender-finding services worldwide using the brand name 
OpenOpps​. FTSE 100 companies and the government use the site. 

Insights 

Despite the guidance from central government on the publication of data by 
local authorities, Spend Network spends a lot of time and effort identifying, 
cleaning and analysing data. In this ecosystem, as an aggregator, they curate 
data, push for its publication when it isn't available, query quality issues and 
suggest improvements. They also lobby for data with copyrights to be 
published openly. 
 
However, despite the large amount of activity on both the part of Spend Network 
and public sector organisations, and despite the opportunities mentioned, we 
are yet to identify specific examples of where the data has been used to improve 
procurement in a public sector organisation.  
 
 

   

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Example 2b. NHS publication of open data 

NHS open data – in a nutshell 

The NHS spends over £110bn a year delivering health services in England and 
has a complex arrangement for providing these services at a local level. 
There are many organisations who variously support and oversee the design 
and provision of services. Many of these organisations collect and analyse data, 
which is used to analyse performance and improve quality and access to health 
services for citizens. The ODI undertook a workshop with members of NHS 
England and NHS Digital to begin to map out some of the key open data uses in 
the NHS. The NHS is a vast network of organisations and understanding the full 
position of use of open data would take considerable further research and 
expert knowledge. 

How open data can support the delivery of health services: benefits 
to the public sector 

The majority of data use within the NHS is individual-level data. This data is used 
for the delivery of direct care or, in pseudonymised or anonymised form, for 
research and planning. The data is made available to NHS organisations through 
the NHS Digital ​Secondary Uses Service​ and to outside organisations through 
other means with appropriate controls in place. Some healthcare trusts have 
data-sharing arrangements with private, voluntary or academic sector 
organisations who also provide analytical insight and services to organisations 
at various levels within the NHS. Performance improvement organisations in the 
NHS such as clinical audits and the ​Commissioning Support Units​ (CSUs) 
also use data and analysis in their work with health care trusts and 
Clinical Commissioning Groups.  

NHS open data story 

In our very cursory consideration of this area we identified some examples of 
open data use. The ODI has highlighted in ​this blog post35 a number of key open 
data sets which have been – and are being – published. A relatively well-known 
example of the potential of open data in the NHS is the use of open prescribing 
data. ​Practice-level prescribing data​ is published by NHS Digital every month. 
This is a list of all medicines, dressings and appliances prescribed by all 
practices in England, including GP practices. In 2012, Mastodon C and the 
Open Data Institute used this data to demonstrate the type of analysis that open 
data could provide. They issued a report highlighting the savings the NHS could 
make if they shifted from branded drugs to generic ones using the open 
prescribing dataset. Latterly, an organisation called ​Open Prescribing​ has been 
using the data to provide ongoing analysis to the health service. 
 
There are also examples of open publication of data within the NHS that have 
been associated with clinical impacts. For instance, when MRSA instances were 
published as open data there was an 85% reduction in the number of cases, 

35
ODI (2015), ‘How can open data help improve healthcare?’, 
https://theodi.org/blog/how-can-open-data-help-improve-healthcare  
 

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though it is difficult to disaggregate the impact that publication has from things 
like media activity and quality and safety improvement work. 

Insights 

Although data is used routinely throughout the NHS, it seems from our initial 
research that the potential of open data is not fully realised. The few examples 
of open data publication are yet to show impacts in terms of changes to 
services, despite the promise that they show (eg prescribing data).  
 
The NHS open data agenda could perhaps learn from the tactics and 
approaches used in ecosystems that we have explored elsewhere, where 
connections have been made between the potential uses of open data and its 
publication, and feedback loops established. We recognise that this is a more 
complicated undertaking given that the NHS is a complex system and its data 
is also complicated. There may be an opportunity to use a “problem-focused” 
approach at Trust level and on data which is more able to be published due to 
its non-personal nature (e.g. around service provision).36   

36
We welcome feedback as comments in the document or in an email to 
[email protected] 
 

Open Data Institute 2018 / Using open data to deliver public services What data publishers need 32 
  
 

Example 2c. Urban Intelligence publishing local planning information 

Urban Intelligence – in a nutshell 

Urban Intelligence is a PlanTech startup developing a central repository of open 

information on UK planning policies. A tool called ​Howard​ provides a map that 
links planning policy information to its relevant locations, making it easier and 
quicker to navigate the complex planning policy landscape. Howard offers a 
mapping interface that allows property professionals to click on a site and get 
all relevant planning policy information for that site. It is the first centralised 
repository of planning policy information in the UK and allows planners to 
assess planning risks and opportunities associated with a specific location. 

How open data can support the delivery of urban planning services: 
benefits to the public sector 

Spatial planning and planning approvals are public services. The process is 
simpler if the relevant policies for each location and project are easier to find. 
Local authorities can use the platform free of charge to inform planning 
decisions, and with planning information available online, it is quicker and easier 
to provide this information to developers. 

Urban Intelligence’s story 

Urban Intelligence aggregates and organises information and data on planning 

policy from local councils, including policy documents and geospatial data. 
A number of local authorities have published their geographic data openly on 
data.gov.uk​ via Ordnance Survey's “Presumption to Publish” process.  
 
Not all local authorities currently publish geographic data openly, which means 
the platform can’t currently cover these areas. Urban Intelligence works closely 
with local authorities to encourage them towards an open data approach. 
As a member of Ordnance Survey’s Geovation Hub and as Ordnance Survey’s 
partner organisation, Urban Intelligence has been developing their map feature 
using ​Ordnance Survey MasterMap​. OS MasterMap is a source of highly 
detailed geographic data about Great Britain, offering topographic, imagery and 
networks layers. OS MasterMap data is not open, but the ​Autumn Budget 
included a commitment that could lead to OS MasterMap data being made 
available as open data​.37 Open OS MasterMap data would encourage more 
services like Howard to emerge. 
 
The product is used by private sector organisations (planning consultancies, 
architecture practices, property developers, etc), who are often interested in 
understanding policy frameworks within and across different councils. 
Equally, local authority planning officers are provided with access to the 
platform for free to aid their work and service provision. 

37
See ODI (2017), ‘What will the UK’s Geospatial Commission look like?’, 
https://theodi.org/blog/what-will-the-uks-geospatial-commission-look-like  
 

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Insights 

Local authorities differ in the types and amount of data they publish openly. 
Actively working with them to support the release of open data to achieve 
benefits for the public sector appears to work well. There may be potential for 
peer-to-peer networks of local authorities at different stages of their open data 
progress. The development of new tools and approaches is made easier when 
geospatial data is made as open as possible. This should form part of any 
strategy to build stronger data infrastructure at local or national level.38 

   

38
https://theodi.org/what-is-data-infrastructure 
 

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Pattern 3 – Open data for policy development 

Finally, this group of examples centre around open data informing policy 
development and strategic direction. In these, the direct beneficiaries are 
involved in policy and strategy for the development of public services. 
Openness improves access to data across different branches of government 
and beyond, which can then be used to inform policy decisions. 
 

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Example 3a. The Department for Work and Pensions development of 
Churchill

Open Data Institute 2018 / Using open data to deliver public services What data publishers need 36 
  
 

Churchill – in a nutshell 

Churchill is the working title for a digital data service being developed by the 
Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) that is run entirely on open data APIs 
and data published in CSVs from UK government sources. The service is 
a combination of a data visualisation tool built on D3 javascript libraries and 
a Mongo DB backend. ​This video39 explains Churchill briefly. 

How open data can support the delivery of DWP services: benefits to 
the public sector 

Churchill helps policy and delivery officials in DWP to develop more 

evidence-driven policy and services with data visualisations pulled from open 
data across government. 
 

 
 

DWP Churchill’s story 

The DWP has a history of making its statistical data available to the public 
through statistical publications and more recently through the online portal 
Stats-Xplore​. There was a ​renewed expectation that the department would 
become more digitally driven​,40 which has included data. This resulted in some 
organisational restructuring to bring data teams and digital teams together. 
The new Director General, Mayank Prakash, also made a commitment to 
“driving​ ​hard for visualised analytics to be the norm not the exception”​.41 
 

39
Youtube (2017), ‘Churchill, making better use of data’, 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn-Utxqjthg  
40
DWP Digital Blog (2017), ‘DWP Digital: Delivering the government transformation 
vision’, 
https://dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk/2017/02/17/dwp-digital-delivering-the-government-transf
ormation-vision/  
41
Digital Leaders (2017), ‘Transformation and Innovation – use of data analytics in 
designing services’, 
https://digileaders.com/transformation-innovation-use-data-analytics-designing-services
/  
 

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One of the data science teams based in Newcastle began exploring the user 
needs of policy colleagues in the DWP who use data to inform policy and service 
design. They undertook extensive user research with policy colleagues at 
Grades 6/7 about what their needs were, and then developed a persona and 
elaborated the user needs for a new data-driven product. This work captured the 
level of data literacy as well as the current workflows and packages being used. 
They also considered other products and services that could be used by policy 
professionals and analysts in the DWP, such as ​LGInform​ developed by the 
Local Government Association​, which pulls together data from DWP as well as 
data published by local authorities. The eventual approach to the product was 
inspired by the world of data journalism, including that used by ONS on their 
ONS.visual site​, which creates a number of statistical visualisations based on 
user research. 
 
An prototype of the software was developed in DWP. It draws on data available 
from open data APIs across government, which is then copied into a database 
and updated regularly. A key part of the development was to make sure that the 
platform satisfied DWP security protocols – the system was set up from scratch. 
The frontend visualisation is run on the ​D3 javascript library​. Part of the 
development of the product has been ​working in the open​.42  
 
There were a number of reasons for using open data to power the service. 
First, in some instances, it is easier to access open data than it is to access 
shared data. Second, some of the interviewees saw open data as trusted data 
as it has gone through a process of quality assurance prior to publication. 
The product was launched internally to demonstrate the possibilities to 
colleagues. Subsequently, Churchill has attracted interest from other 
government departments and ​has been profiled externally43 as well as having 
had interest from the Canadian and Australian governments. 
 
The main potential impact of this use of open data and the development of 
Churchill is likely to be the reduced amount of time that policy colleagues and 
analysts in the DWP will need to spend accessing, cleaning and analysing data. 
This may also support more iterative and agile policy development as issues can 
be investigated more quickly. Potentially, the tool could help release the 
resource of an analyst.  
 
Quicker data access and analysis can free up resources to better focus on policy 
and strategy decision-making. In addition, better data quality and better data 
visualisation can support more informed policy and strategy decisions. 
Availability of data visualisations of related services means it is easier to spot 
dependencies and relationships that need to be considered in service design 
and the direction of policy decisions. An example of this could be more effective 
job seeker allowance policy. This is in line with government aspirations set out in 

42
DWP Digital Blog (2017), ‘Data for people who don’t like data’, 
https://dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk/2017/02/24/data-for-people-who-dont-like-data/  
43
apolitical (2017), ‘How can policymakers get the most out of data? Ask Churchill’, 
https://apolitical.co/solution_article/can-policymakers-get-data-ask-churchill/  
 

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the recent Government Transformation Strategy44 to make better use of data by 
making it available for internal uses through APIs.  
 
If the tool was shared across government there would also be a strong 
value-for-money benefit in the reduction of each department procuring individual 
solutions, as well as the productivity impacts. In the longer run, it could support 
greater standardisation of geographical data across government as civil servants 
will be more able to spot the datasets that need standardisation by attempting to 
use them through the tool. Use will also likely highlight anomalies or 
inconsistencies, which will help to improve the quality of government open data 
as there is a greater link between those who collect the data and those who are 
using it. 

Insights 

The release of open data has brought innovation within government. Churchill’s 
development by a team within DWP is only possible if data is opened up; open 
data innovation leadership can come from unexpected places. 
 
Digital transformation tools and approaches have supported the development of 
a data product. One of the key drivers of Churchill’s development was that it 
was incorporated within a broader digital transformation agenda within the DWP, 
which gave energy and process to the development. 
 
 

44
HMG (2017), ‘Government Transformation Strategy’, 
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-transformation-strategy-2017
-to-2020/government-transformation-strategy#build-better-tools-processes-and-govern
ance-for-civil-servants   
 

Open Data Institute 2018 / Using open data to deliver public services What data publishers need 39 
  
 

Example 3b. Cabinet Office release of government grants data 

Open Data Institute 2018 / Using open data to deliver public services What data publishers need 40 
  
 

Government Grants Information System – in a nutshell 

The ​Government Grants Information System (GGIS)​ provides information 

on grants worth £100 billion (2016–2017) from 16 government departments.45 
Grants range from government funding for schools, to UK Sport grants, 
to funding for bus service operators. 

How open data can support the delivery of grant-funded public 

services: benefits to the public sector 

Access to grants data provides government and external organisations with 

opportunities to assess resource allocation on a national as well as on a more 
granular level. This contributes to transparency, efficiency and effectiveness 
in government. 

Government Grants Information System’s story 

The grants team within the Cabinet Office receive data from 16 central 
government departments (including HM Treasury, who make payments to 
departments to award grants but who also issue grants directly) on the grants 
they pay out to about 35 organisations – for example, schools, UK Sport 
organisations, or bus service operators. The total annual amount of grants 
in GGIS is about £100 billion.46  
 
The 16 departments use their individual legacy systems to manage data. 
To arrive at a common format, the departments transfer the data into a template 
spreadsheet, which they send to the grants team in the Cabinet Office, where all 
data gets aggregated in GGIS. Grants are structured in schemes, which are 
broken down into individual awards. The majority of grants data is broken down 
into awards but some of it is on a scheme level. The system generates unique 
identifiers on an award and scheme level to allow detailed analysis. This data is 
openly available to download in csv format. 
 
The Cabinet Office use the data internally to inform policies and spot 
opportunities for efficiency gains across government. GGIS data also feeds into 
the ​government grants register​, where it can be downloaded in csv format. 
The data also feeds into ​360Giving​, who support funders to publish their grants 
data openly and in a comparable way on the open data platform ​GRANTNAV​, 
under the ​360Giving Standard​. 
 
GGIS offers transparency in the grants system, which makes up a substantial 
share of the UK budget, and allows anyone to use this data to analyse grant 
flows in the UK. Central government benefits from having a single source of data 
in a common format to get a broad view across departments and to design an 
intelligent grants system.  
 

45
Gov.uk (n.d.), ‘Government grants register’, 
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-grants-register  
46
Gov.uk (n.d.), ‘Government grants register’, 
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-grants-register  
 

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Individual departments benefit from understanding their own grant flows better 
and identifying overlaps or synergies with other departments. As services 
become more integrated, departments need to break down silos and understand 
their role as part of a larger ecosystem; having sight of grants can help with that. 
Open grants data also enables an assessment of particular programmes that are 
run across departments.  
 
360 Giving have launched a ​Challenge Fund47 to identify what questions need 
answering and how open grants data can help. Participants submitted questions 
about the geographical distribution of grants48 and the types of organisations 
that receive grants.49 This initiative suggests that open grants data is used to 
answer important questions about access to funding for the delivery of 
public services. 
 
Outside of government, the media, civil society and individual citizens can use 
data to analyse grant flows or find out how much funding a local organisation 
receives. Grant recipients can compare their own grants with those of similar 
organisations and prepare targeted applications.  
 
If open grants data is linked with ​Open Contracting​ data from the Crown 
Commercial Service, it would be possible to identify the total amount of funding 
received by an organisation in grants and project funding.  
 
Open grants data refers to grants awarded. Ideally, in future this could be 
compared with actual spending to get a full picture.  

Insights 

Sourcing data from different departments with their own legacy data 
management systems and publishing it on different databases highlights the 
importance of common data standards and formats that make it possible to 
aggregate and compare datasets.  

   

47
360Giving (2016), ‘Challenge Fund – seven weeks in’, 
http://www.threesixtygiving.org/2018/01/03/challenge-fund-seven-weeks-in/  
48
See for example Forum 360 Giving (2017), ‘Profile by where there are geographical 
gaps?’, 
https://forum.threesixtygiving.org/t/profile-by-where-there-are-geographical-gaps/133  
49
See for example Forum 360Giving (2017), ‘Core or project funding’, 
https://forum.threesixtygiving.org/t/core-or-project-funding/121?u=natalia  
 

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Insights from examples 

There are some similarities across the examples which are worth elaborating on. 
We can group these in terms of organisations and processes, and in terms of 
effects and outcomes. 

Organisational collaboration 
A key characteristic is that each of the ecosystems is made up of organisations 
that all play a discrete role in the delivery of a public service. 
 
This characteristic is perhaps highlighted by the fact that in none of these 
examples is one organisation responsible for the end-to-end delivery of public 
service. Each of these public services in each of the ecosystems can only be 
delivered if a number of organisations and individuals within those organisations 
have the resources and appropriate knowledge to do their jobs correctly. When 
working across organisations, the need for easy access and use of data 
becomes even more important. In this way, open data can be said to be a 
key ingredient in ensuring greater coordination, more efficiency and a better 
end-user experience. 
 
● In the Leeds City Council example (1b.), Bartec and imactivate jointly 
deliver the waste collection service 
● In the Urban Intelligence example (2c.), local planning involves councils, 
developers and landowners and planning is made more efficient by the 
service offered by Urban Intelligence 

Technology infrastructure, digital skills and literacy 

Another aspect of each of the ecosystems is the importance of technology. 
There is a minimum level of digital infrastructure, skills and literacy, and 
capability needed for public-sector organisations to make the most of open data 
in their public-sector delivery model. This does not just relate to the technology 
within the public sector but also within the wider ecosystem of the private sector 
and civil society. 
 
● In the Leeds City Council example (1b.), Leeds City Council saw value 
in open data and technology for local service delivery. This led to an 
exploration of how open data can solve real problems and made the 
development of the Leeds Bins app possible. 
● In the Familio example (1c.), guidance from the Department for Education 
on the potential of open data for service delivery is an important success 
factor. In order for councils to make use of the data, a minimum level of 
digital skills and literacy are necessary. 
● In the Cabinet Office example (3b.), a dedicated team in the Cabinet 
Office, through their understanding of the opportunities provided by 
technology and data, support the establishment and use of the 
Government Grants Information System. 

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Foundational data infrastructure 

A data infrastructure consists of data assets, the organisations that operate and 
maintain them, the technologies and processes required to use the data, and 
more50. Strong data infrastructure opens up new opportunities – it makes it 
easier for others to use data to create new products and services, or develop 
new insight, and it can support diverse data ecosystems. Often, data 
infrastructure will include foundational datasets that support a broad range of 
uses, particularly if made available as open data that anyone can access, use 
and share. 
 
There are a number of key types of datasets that support the different 
ecosystems we have identified. Given the nature of the discussions in the 
interviews and workshops we held we cannot necessarily be sure that the most 
important datasets were always highlighted, although geospatial data such as 
maps, addresses and boundaries were of particular importance in at least half of 
the ecosystems. They help members of the public and people within government 
make sense of other data.  
 
● In the TfL example (1a.) data describing the location of stations is often 
used to help people access the most relevant transport options nearby. 
● In the Urban Intelligence example (2c.), geographical data is at the core 
of the tool Howard – which provides a map that links planning policy 
information to its relevant locations – making it easier and quicker to 
navigate the complex planning policy landscape. 
● In the Churchill example (3a.), administrative geography data is important 
in understanding relationships with other open datasets. 

Open standards for data 

Data standards were used in open data releases across most of the ecosystems. 
For instance, a data standard was developed following the development of the 
Leeds Bins app.  
 
● In the example on local authority spending (2a.), two international 
standards have been central to reducing the additional data preparation 
and increasing the value of the data released. 
● In the Cabinet Office example (3b.), receiving grants data from different 
departments across government with their own individual financial 
systems highlights the importance of standards. 

Senior-level championing  
In many of the examples, we found that systems matured best when the open 
approach was championed at the senior level. This can be a councillor, minister 
or a senior individual, depending on the type of organisation. These senior 
leaders highlight the strategic opportunity that the organisation has in releasing 
open data, prioritise resources to focus on it, and give cover for others to 
overcome internal resistance elsewhere in the organisation. 

50
https://theodi.org/what-is-data-infrastructure 
 

Open Data Institute 2018 / Using open data to deliver public services What data publishers need 44 
  
 

 
● In the Leeds City Council example (1b.), the City Council’s drive and 
initiative has been a key success factor, which led to problems being 
articulated, solutions being developed, open data being included in the 
contract with Bartec, and finally the Leeds Bins app. 

Peer networks 
As well as the senior leaders in these ecosystems, there was also a pattern 
of ​peer networks​ across organisations helping to encourage development. 
Equally, closed data ecosystems can be developed with networks and 
connections among key individuals. However, in the case of these open data 
ecosystems it seems that influential networks may use different, more open, 
channels and approaches – for instance connections through Twitter, blogging, 
and ​unconferences​ such as ​Open Data Camp​, ​LocalGovCamp​, etc (2a.).  
 
This is currently anecdotal, and further research could look in more detail at 
whether there is clearer evidence that processes and opportunities like these 
have made a difference in the approach that some of these open data 
ecosystems have taken. 

Intermediaries 
Key players within many of these ecosystems (1a., 2b.) are data intermediaries, 
organisations which have a specific role in ensuring that the open data the 
public sector organisations make available is usable by other organisations. 
These intermediaries take data published openly or shared by the public and 
private sector and can undertake a number of activities such as aggregating 
data from a number of sources, standardising it and making it more usable by 
others. The role of these organisations is not always obvious from a cursory 
description of the effect of open data and can be missed from a description of 
how open data is actually used to deliver a service. The exact form of the 
intermediary and the activities they undertake can also belie the maturity of the 
particular ecosystem. 
 
● In the Familio example (1c.), different providers, coordinated by the 
council, deliver childcare and family services, and Famiio improves 
access for citizens. The example highlights that it is important to consider 
intermediaries and the role they play in the delivery of a service. 

Problem focus 
Where services have more successfully integrated open data in their delivery, 
they have had processes that work to solve a particular problem that the 
organisation is focused on rather than publishing open data for the sake of it.  
 
● In the DWP example (3a.), the team developing the Churchill service took 
a user-centred design approach to understand how government policy 
officials used data, and then sought out relevant open data to 
incorporate into the product.  
● Similarly, in the Leeds City Council example (1b.), the app came out of an 
acceleration programme to identify service issues which could be tackled 
 

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through the use of data and identified a specific problem of citizens not 
knowing when their bins will be collected, which then drove the 
development of a solution in the form of the Leeds Bins app. Different 
approaches might also be successful in identifying how open data can 
support the delivery of public services, but focused activity might be able 
to identify opportunities more easily. 
● In examples 2a. (Spend Network), 2b. (NHS) and 3b. (Cabinet Office) 
we can see a focus on the publication of open data rather than on a 
problem. This might explain why these ecosystems are less mature in 
their development than some of the others and why we found fewer 
use cases.  

Open innovation 
Early releases of open data seem to have helped push forward and identify 
further possibilities for improvement, which created impact in service delivery. 
For instance, in the case of TfL the release of a small number of datasets as 
feeds eventually led to the development of a more open ​API​ system 
– a development which might not have happened if closed data-sharing 
agreements had been made. In addition, in several of the ecosystems we 
concluded that choosing an open approach to data publication has attracted 
more external interest and involvement than if the public sector organisation 
had taken a closed approach.  
 
● As an example, TfL are now be able to claim the involvement of more 
than 14,000 developers in their data, which would have been difficult 
if they had had to make arrangements to grant each of these 
specific access. 
● In examples 1c. and 2c., organisations outside the public sector have 
developed solutions for problems in delivering public services. This is 
made possible by sharing the challenges and releasing the relevant 
data openly. 

   

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Recommendations 
Based on the work undertaken so far, we have developed 
recommendations for a range of actors in order to 
support greater use of open data in the delivery of 
public ​ ​services. 
 
These are initial ideas: we would value feedback on them51 and will also test 
them throughout the rest of the project. We have organised them according 
to the main insights that we have identified from the research so far. These 
recommendations are also based on the experience the ODI has gained ​working 
with governments internationally to develop their open data programmes​.52  
 
The main audience for the recommendations are those working in the public 
sector and thinking about how to support their open data ecosystem to help 
deliver their public service. However, we have also identified specific ways that 
central government could support each of these aspects and have flagged these 
up where relevant. 

Organisational collaboration 
● In starting to explore the ways in which open data can support the 
delivery of a service, be clear about which organisations are involved, 
both within and outside of government. 
● Recognise that there are players in an open data ecosystem beyond 
publishers and users. How data is licensed and published shapes those 
ecosystems by making some roles more or less viable. 

Central government recommendation: fund public sector 

organisations to experiment with using open data to support 
the delivery of public services 
The availability of funding for activity is a key determinant of activity. We 
received 24 responses to the invitation to tender for the Stimulus Fund aspect of 
this project. We could have funded more consortia if we had had the resources 
to do so. There is clearly appetite within local government to undertake 
experiments in this area but there are funding challenges. Central government 
should consider funding further activity in this area to help develop these new 
patterns and deliver better services to citizens.   

51
We welcome feedback as comments in the document or in an email to 
[email protected]​. 
52
ODI (2015), ‘Open data in government: how to bring about change’, 
http://opengov.si.md/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/255887396-Open-data-in-governme
nt-how-to-bring-about-change.pdf​.  
 

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Technology infrastructure, digital skills and literacy 

● Consider how a focus on the potential of open data to support your 
service could be undertaken as part of any digital transformation in 
your organisation. 
● Ensure that you have the appropriate underlying technology and skills. 
● Support staff to use open data in public service delivery with practical 
tools and approaches  

Central government recommendation: train public sector staff how to 

use open data in public sector delivery 
In the fieldwork, participants referred to the Government Digital Service (GDS) 
leadership on service design as best practice. This extended to the curriculum 
for the GDS academy and the GDS service design manual, which were influential 
both for public sector staff and the training courses they received from public 
and private sector training providers. 
 
As part of the expansion of the curriculum of service design training towards 
covering data and technology roles and digital competencies, we recommend 
developing specific content for this. This would build on some of the insights 
from this research to help those in non-technical roles understand how open 
data can support services at a strategic level. By including content on this 
topic in the core curriculum, we would hope to influence broader training 
activity to also encompass this topic and hence increase use of open data 
in public service delivery. 

Data infrastructure 
● Public services are underpinned by data infrastructure.53 It is essential 
that this data infrastructure is as open as possible, while respecting 
privacy, to support innovation and encourage the creation of efficient 
and effective services. 

Open standards for data 

● Explore whether open standards are already developed for the data that 
your service supports. 

Senior-level championing 
● Ensure that senior management and elected representatives are aware of 
the opportunities to use open data to deliver your services and champion 
its use in delivery. 

Peer networks 
● If you have not already, join existing networks on Twitter and through 
unconferences such as ​UKGovCamp​ and ​LocalGovCamp​. 

53
https://theodi.org/what-is-data-infrastructure  
 

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● Create a network of those who are interested and involved in using open 
data for public service delivery. 
● Allow members of your organisation to network across and outside 
your organisation. 
● The ODI has recently published a ​methods paper on developing peer 
networks for open data leaders​ which contains more recommendations 
for activities.54 

Intermediaries 
● When looking to elaborate the broader ecosystems, identify and establish 
relationships with intermediary organisations who are adding value by 
taking and transforming their data for other purposes. 

Problem focus 
● Focus initial discussion of an open data approach to service delivery 
on the issue you are trying to improve in the service rather than the data 
that is available. Always link the benefits of the publication or use of 
open data to your organisation’s overarching or fundamental goals 
and objectives.   

54
ODI (2016), ‘Method report: Peer networks for open data leaders’, 
https://theodi.org/method-report-peer-networks-for-open-data-leaders  
 

Open Data Institute 2018 / Using open data to deliver public services What data publishers need 49 
  
 

Next steps 
To carry the research findings forward, we will pilot learning materials 
and continue working with the Stimulus Fund consortia to experiment 
with redesigning public services using open data. 

Learning materials 
We are developing and testing a range of learning materials with different 
audiences within the public sector.  
 
These will build on the learnings from this report and the materials which are 
being developed by the four consortia that are part of the Stimulus Fund. 
 
Specifically, we will also continue to develop the ecosystem mapping 
methodology. So far, in the fieldwork and broader engagement undertaken 
in this research, we have received positive feedback regarding ecosystem 
mapping as a way to elaborate and understand how open data can make 
public service delivery better.  
 
We will further develop the methodology in the remainder of our research. 
In particular, we will: 
● adopt the methodology to document the work undertaken in the four 
Stimulus Fund consortia 
● examine how this methodology can be used as one of the learning 
materials developed in this project 
● extend the methodology to other aspects of the ​ODI’s R&D programme, 
including its ​open standards for data​ project 
● explore how this methodology can more systematically capture the 
commonalities identified between ecosystems in this research, such 
as the foundational data, open standards used, etc.  

Stimulus Fund 
The four Stimulus Fund consortia will finish their redesign of a public service 
using open data. They will create design patterns and capture the effects open 
data has or will have on the delivery of their public service. Along the course of 
the funding period, they will capture their learning and develop tools and 
approaches that they find useful as part of their redesign process. We will share 
the design patterns, tools and approaches openly on ODI’s website as resources 
for other councils that want to redesign public services using open data. 

Open Data Institute 2018 / Using open data to deliver public services What data publishers need 50 
  
 

Method 
Having settled on a working definition of a public service, we started our 
research by compiling a database of UK and international examples to identify 
which examples to pursue. 
 
These examples came from three sources. First, there were those which were 
already known to members of the ODI through its global work with the public 
and private sector.  
 
A second source was a broad internet search and screening research 
organisations that had similarly been focusing on the open data agenda. 
This included organisations such as Open Knowledge, GovLab, the Knight 
Foundation and Sunlight Foundation, amongst others. In addition, we looked 
at open data portals where they listed examples of use.  
 
Finally, we undertook a search of reports and other documents published on 
the topic of data use within UK government, with a specific focus on open data.  
 
We supported this secondary research by primary research interviews with 
experts from the community. These interviews highlighted examples and helped 
to develop and expand our approach and explanatory framework for the rest of 
the project. 
 
The details in the examples were mostly captured in workshops with individuals 
who had a close working knowledge of the area. We spent the majority of the 
workshop time working with the participants to draw a rich picture of the 
example identified and talking through the key aspects that emerged.  
 
Working with illustrator ​Ian Dutnall​, we have translated these rich pictures into 
more schematic diagrams and accompanied them with a written description 
of the key characteristics of each. We have tried to make these examples as 
comparable as possible but due to their subject matter and the insight of the 
individuals, there may be differences in detail.  
 
In the process of developing the illustrations and drafting the descriptions of the 
examples, we have reconfirmed the detail with relevant individuals and, where 
appropriate, have omitted commercially sensitive or otherwise confidential 
information at their request. 
 

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