Month: December 2021

2021 – A Year in review

The continued running of hack weekends as online events due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation resulted in the widening of our attendee audience beyond Aberdeen. This saw attendance across the length and breadth of the UK and international attendees from the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. These international attendees contributed to projects that had the potential to benefit the citizens of Aberdeen that our remit looks to support. This demonstrated that our message and vision is spreading beyond our traditional geographical base. However our attendance numbers for online-only events have dwindled compared to those held in physical spaces and we look forward to moving to hybrid events as soon as we can. 

We’ve supported the creation and initial deployment of two significant infrastructural projects: Open Data Scotland and Open Waste UK both of which will fill large gaps in society’s access to data about government.

We recently appointed two new trustees, Pauline Cairns and Karen Jewell who are already injecting additional enthusiasm and energy into our operations.

Events

CTC22: The Environment

Online – 20-21 Mar 2021

Event page

Key projects:

  • Bioregional Dashboards
  • Waste Wizards
  • Meet Your Next MSP

Notable Outcomes:

  • The website  https://openwastemap.uk was launched. This was underpinned by Open Streetmap data and 922 HWRCs which had been added to WIkidata. 
  • The Bioregion Dashboard team worked to make it easier for anyone to make a dashboard for their own area. 

CTC23: The Future of the City

12-13 Jun 2021

Event page

Key projects:

Notable Outcomes:

  •  The first steps taken to catalogue open data from local authorities in Scotland. Scripts written to gather data from council open data portals and GIS publishing platforms. Analysis of the status quo were performed. 
  • Prototyping of a sound map of Aberdeen.

CTC24: Open in Practice 

Online – 27/8 Nov 2021

Event page

Key projects:

Notable Outcomes:

Impact from pre-2021 Events

2021 saw the continuation of several projects that had been initiated at CTC events from previous years, a perfect demonstration of how CTC has a lasting positive impact.

Harbour Arrivals Transcriptions

During 2020 the Harbour Arrivals physical records for the period 1914 to 1920 were transcribed into a spreadsheet with a website built to make the data open for anyone to explore and use. In 2021 a data story was created focusing on the type of ships coming into the harbour from various ports, the imports to sustain the region, and the comments recorded by harbour staff.

SODU 2021

The second iteration the Scottish Open Data Unconference

2-3 Oct 2021

Event page

Key items:

  • While we had great engagement from civic society once again, there was poor showing from Government at all levels, Academia and Journalism.
  • Good news stories in Open Data
  • Attendees from overseas and across UK
  • Demonstration of Data Commons Scotland project

Notable Outcomes:

  •  A plan to take forward a number of existing open data projects including
    • Open Data Scotland
    • Wikidata representation of government in Scotland

Python Aberdeen

We held 11 Aberdeen Python User Group sessions over the last year with 10 speakers and a total of 240 attendees.

Non-event Based Achievements

Intern Project – Summer 2021

We took on our first intern this summer. Sara, a post-grad student from Edinburgh University worked with our trustee Ian, a group of volunteer transcribers, and Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives to open up data and images from the Aberdeen Register of Returned Convicts 1869 to 1939. This resulted in structured open data for 248 convicts being made available, as well as 59 images of them being licenced for reuse. You can read more on the project page.

Award nominations

For the second year running Ian received an honourable mention in the UK Wikimedian of the Year awards.

Code The City were delighted to be nominated in the Data category at the Open UK awards in November 2021. Unfortunately we were runners up to OKFN. 

Looking ahead

2022 will see a renewed strategy and business plan for CTC. We will return to Hybrid events as soon as we can safely do so. We will continue to support and build on projects such as Open Data Scotland. We will look at hosting one or more interns again this year. We will continue to seek to better commitment from government on the provision of open data – and get participation in events such as SODU.

Thank you

Thanks to all of our attendees, supporters, volunteers and interns who make our events so successful and impactful. We wish you a quiet and restful festive season and look forward to working with you again in the new year.

Ian, Karen, Bruce, Pauline and Andrew

Header Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Modelling Government in Scotland on Wikidata

This was one of three projects which were worked on during CTC24 – Open In Practice. We asked Jan Ainali, who led the project, to explain it for those who were not present at the weekend event.

Why did we run this project? 

On Wikidata, there is a WikiProject for getting all the government agencies of all levels and the whole world properly modeled. Since it is a huge project, every way to try to break it down to bite size pieces are necessary. Work on the UK was already started, so it made a lot of sense trying to complete Scotland.

Work done before CTC24

In October during Scottish Open Data Unconference 2021 we got started on this task. We found some good sources and made fine progress, completing several categories of agencies. By completing here, I mean that we made sure there were items in Wikidata representing the agencies and that they were well enough modeled so that we could query for them. But we weren’t done, and some of the trickiest parts remained. 

What we achieved at CTC24, what impact we hope it will have

With a joint effort, we managed to sort out how the judicial system was organized, which was something that remained unclear since the last session. Most time was spent in researching to understand it, and when that was done, it was fairly straightforward to create items for the courts that were missing and to model the others in a way that made it possible to query for them. We also managed to sort out some other small tasks from the last event, and finally we could produce one huge query to get all Scottish agencies at once:  https://w.wiki/4TpN

Now we think this is the most complete and up-to-date list of Scottish agencies. If we are wrong about that, we would love feedback so that we can improve it.

What next – how can people get involved?

A few things are happening right now. First, we are importing agencies into the Govdirectory platform that is a more user-friendly view of Wikidata. We have already imported the local authorities, NHS boards and Health and Social Care Partnerships. You can find that data here: https://www.govdirectory.org/united-kingdom/

Since the large query was a bit messy, we will also try to improve the modeling in Wikidata. You are more than welcome to help with this. This will make queries for everybody simpler, and we will continuously be importing more agencies to the platform as we get done.

You can also help by adding contact points like email, official websites, social media accounts to the Wikidata items. You can either use the Wikidata button on the Govdirectory website, or you can go to the WikiProject page on Wikidata and run some queries there to find items to improve. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Govdirectory/United_Kingdom

Header Image by Jan Ainali, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons