Happy Open Data Day!! OK, I’m early, the big day isn’t until Saturday 5 March but we wanted you to have time to get your party hats, balloons and cakes all ready for the weekend (if you needed an excuse to eat cake we've got you covered).
We wanted to mark the occasion by celebrating all the great stuff that we have been working on this year. Last year’s Open Data Day celebrations covered all things COVID and how our team had created an interactive tool to evidence and breakdown what was going on in our Essex districts regarding the spread of coronavirus. This year we are going to reflect on some of the promises we made in 2021 and update you on our progress, as well as share some exciting new content.
External Partnership work
We kicked off 2021 working with the Essex County Fire and Rescue Service to create an interactive tool for the public to access data that shows what incidents the fire service attend. Throughout this project we ticked all of boxes regarding transparency, collaboration and innovation and here is a blog that breaks this down brilliantly. As a result of this ECFRS are in the process of completing more work with us on accidental dwelling fires, they have invited us to present our partnership work at the PFCC Conference in the spring, as it has a focus on prevention, and they have created a new data analyst role to further support partnership working, which is great to see and we look forward to continuing to produce great work alongside them.
Our promises from last year!
We are currently redesigning the Essex Open Data platform and engaging with users to understand and better suit their needs - TICK! We have redesigned the platform and made it easier to navigate, added new functionality and more content has been uploaded.
We promise to keep publishing new, exciting datasets, and building interactive tools. We’re going to continue the great work already started with existing/new partners to bring new data to Essex Open Data, making it a central portal for any and all data needs for residents - TICK! We have built lots of new exciting interactive tools for users and published popular datasets. Climate change is one example; ECC has placed addressing climate change at the heart of its strategic priorities. Essex's Open Data portal will play a vital role in helping ECC, and our partners, understand the extent of the challenge and to share resources with each other. A presentation using Open Data set out the climate change challenge that awaits us, and this can be found here As more analytical projects are undertaken on climate change, http://www.data.essex.gov.uk/
The Electoral Division Profiles Dashboard is an interactive tool which presents information on the 70 electoral divisions in Essex and the districts they are part of.
This tool provides in one page an overview of each electoral division using a variety of indicators such as:
- district population by age and gender
- district employment rates
- electoral division residents profiles
- district portraits
- results of the May 2021 local elections.
The Unemployment and Job Market profiles dashboard visualises the jobs available in certain districts in Essex, what jobs the residents of those districts have and compares these figures with unemployment data to provide a detailed profile of employment in Essex.
And to finish…
We have had another great year opening up data for everyone from the general public to external partners and will continue to produce, access and share data in 2022/23. We would like to thank everyone that has accessed, used and uploaded direct to the platform, the team look forward to continuing the great work that has transpired so far. We couldn’t have produced half this work if it wasn’t for you all! 2022/23 will be another year of hard work, progress and creating stronger partnerships throughout the whole of Essex.
If you’d like to discover the possibilities of collaborating on an open data project, contact us via email on open.data@essex.gov.uk
Thanks Again
The Open Data Team
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