This week, it appears that Adrian Short, has taken the data released from Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, and produced Armchair Auditor.

This is a website that simply takes the CSV information provided by the council, pulls it into a database, and allows you to examine it by Directorate (Services), and Supplier (Company paid for delivering a service). It is quite nice and easy to use, and you can simply see that, for instance, Capita Business Services Ltd were paid 15 times, totalling £52,493 between Sept 2009 and March 2010, the average amount of each payment was £3,499.

It also highlights the fact that the Supplier Master may give you a bit more information than you currently have. As Capita are shown as:

• Capita Business Services Ltd
• Capita Education Resourcing
• Capita Education Services Ltd
• Capita Software Services
• Capita Training Ltd

So it looks like these are related businesses, indeed seperate companies, but the ultimate beneficial owner maybe ‘Capita Group PLC’. It also shows that payments were made to Capita Education Resourcing and Capita Education Services. These may actually be one company, and just different divisions within the company structure. If you had a full supplier master, it’s likely that these different suppliers will have an indicator to show that they are ‘related’.

A quick check at Companies House doesn’t actually show a result for Capita Education, nor some of the others. For instance Capita Education Resourcing is a trading name of Capita Resourcing Ltd, likewise this may be the same for Education Services.  Companies may be trading under many different names, all of which are actually present as different suppliers in the system, therefore the actual company may be receiving more funds from the council than you presume at first thought.

All of the above was found through a quick play with Armchair Auditor, it shows the strength of the tool at being able to get to the data quickly, and concisely as well as being able to direct someone to your findings with relative ease.

Whilst at the same time, we can see the challenge at understanding the data, especially when you start to look across councils and try and answer questions like ‘How much is supplier X getting paid for services bought by councils across the country’. I’ll discuss approaches for how you might deal with that situation another day.

For now, I’m going to look at the work Adrian has done, and see what else might be interesting within it.

These are just my personal thoughts, and may be incorrect, and they do not represent the thoughts of my employer.

Supplier Identification
I disagree with the phrase ‘Ideally publication would include the Companies House number (or equivalent in the case of foreign companies) or Charity registration number‘. This depends on the quality of data entered into the system, in my experience such level of detail (at least for private sector companies) is never recorded in a Supplier master. You will have the Supplier Name, Internal Supplier ID, Address fields, basic contact details (with a CRM system likely to be holding more details).

Such information is not easy to populate into a system if it’s not already present, I remember a case where we had to identify Dun&Bradstreet numbers for every supplier – it wasn’t an easy job.

I would say, this boils down to one thing – why do you require that level of information, what is wrong with the company name after all unless we are talking about data quality issues?

I’d also be wary of needing to publish the actual contact details for each company, depending how a companies supplier master is setup, you may have the contact details for the person in Accounts Payable. What use is that to the end user? It would need to be researched to understand exactly what data is present etc.

Payroll/Benefits
Dependent on how the Supplier master is setup, it is possible for employee expense reimbursements to be present (i.e every employee is setup as a vendor). Most systems allow you to identify these, not all do though. So it may be possible to anonymise these.

Payroll, at the General Ledger level is likely to be a few entries (the transactions hitting the GL Payroll account, and the bank account), the Payroll data of actual payments (BACS likely) may be held separately to that of where normal supplier payments are made (again, dependent on system structure – I’ve seen them a few ways).

Overall
The other thing to remember, is that in some cases, the data output is likely to be:

01/01/2010
CHQ
£2256.89
A1 Company
INVXYZ002 (or some document reference)
GL CODE
GL Description (i.e Transportation)
Cost Centre Code
Cost Centre (Parks Department).

The above shows that the Parks department paid A1 Company, £2256.89 on -01/01/2010, for a service that the invoice was booked to transportation, and the cost absorbed through the parks department budget.

You’d be surprised how many times there are some systems where it’s not totally easily to identify the payment, back to the relevant invoice (apart from a manual reconciliation), you need to know the invoice side of the transactions – as that is where the cost will be booked to (as the payment details will just be crediting cash, debiting Accounts Payable).

It all depends what level of detail you want to show, it’s easy enough to show a payment went out (but associated services, dependent on the internal reporting functions of the system – may be harder).

These are just my thoughts, from my experiences of working with a multitude of different financial systems from your SAP, to your BAAN and SunSystem.

It’s been used to produce some pieces of analysis on this blog, and I use it regularly for work. What’s great is that alongside their latest commercial release, is that they unveiled Tableau Public. This is a free version, that allows you to download the software, create your analysis and deploy it to their web servers.

You can then grab the embed code, and display visualisations on your blog; which people can then interact with. This platform takes it one step further than just a static image. It’s on par with IBM ManyEyes, but doesn’t use java and, to me at least, is much easier and intuitive to use.

The product has the same feature set as the commercial version, with the only limitations being a 100,000 row limit and restricted data sources.

So for those who have chastised me for using ‘expensive’ software before, don’t worry – you can have a go with one of the latest challengers on the block, as according to Gartner.

P.S. There is an obvious lack of a Tableau Public embedded chart in this post, that is because it does not support the Apple platform. Damn. Instead, here is one they produced:

Luckily I’ve had access to the site whilst it was in private testing, and am able to get an insight into the development world through an associated email group.

The simple thing is, YES it’s great – opening up data, for reuse, how could it not be.

Though NO, it’s not ‘great for the general public end user’. By that I mean, the general public will almost indoubtly benefit due to the applications and products that get developed due to this openness and transparency of data.

For instance, want to know Where Does Your Money Go. This was a concept that was developed through the Show Us A Better Way competition – a precursor, and almost a proof of concept that opening up data is good for us all.

So whilst the outputs are likely to be interesting, I don’t think its necessarily going to be top of every UK citizens todo list to checkout http://data.gov.uk often.

There are a lot of good things that have already come from the site, and this Top 10 Government Data Visualisations from the Guardian demonstrates just some of the talent out there .

I’ll certainly be looking at what is coming out utilising the data available, what mashups get made and such. Meanwhile I need to tune up my Ruby, RDF, SPARQL, etc knowledge to be able to take full advantage. I just don’t think that Joe Public will be doing that.

Maybe I’m just wrong?

So what was it all about?

Hackitude is a two-day hacking event based around your ideas. Non-techie-types can suggest ideas for things they’d like to see made, and hackers can setup or join working groups to make those ideas a reality.

Anyone could suggest an idea (or more than one), that they think is something that is missing in the online world. All the ideas are on the site, so take a browse – could you help build one of them in the future?

We chose to work on one by Dave Harte, which involved letting the public know where allotments where and what facilities they had etc.

I was popping in and out through the evening, but alongside Jamie Garner, but my main task was to help devise the data structure/model that the backend should work on.

The concept was to make it as flexible as possible, allowing us for instance to use the same database, and site, to pull out information on local cafes and facilities, or pubs with wifi etc.

Here is a video shot by Nat, of Aquila TV, of Jamie and myself explaining it (this was taken at around 1AM – so I’m not looking too fresh!)

I had other commitments through the weekend, but popped in a few times to help see how it was progressing and helping/hindering others along the way.

What came out of it was a remarkable system, which can be seen on the Metalocal site. It quickly shows the data, and filters based off what facilities your require.

Only a small subset of data is within the system, but its testament to all that it got done in the space of the weekend.

What do you think? Know of any other cool ideas like this?

P.S. Have a giggle at this:

Thought first, an explanation.  Under the Traffic Management Act 2004 a local authority (i.e council) could request/apply to take up the right for civil enforcement of parking contraventions [historically the police had the power, and contraventions were a criminal act]

Councils have been issued guidelines for levels of charges – including meaning of the ‘contraventions’, this also covers off fees for vehicle removal, storage, release of immobilization devices etc.  As well as the reasons for being able to issue tickets.

What have been historically referred to as ‘Parking Wardens’ are now ‘Civil Enforcement Officers’ (CEOs).  They can issue tickets, or penalty charge notices (PCNs) for any contravention of the rules (the guidelines above discuss the specific reasons for why a notice may be issued)

I have a list of local authorities that have taken up their right for enforcement, and currently we are in the process of sending out the freedom of information requests (FOIs).  If you want to get involved, email me on neil@rasga.co.uk, or checkout the Help Me Investigate site.

From the 50 or so FOIs sent already, (at first we targeted all councils, but have recently received information to let us target those who take up the right), I can categorise the responses as such:

1. We have the data:

• We won’t provide it to you, it will cost too much: Basildon District Council
• Though the report is only on an aggregated basis, you still need multiple reports: Barrow in Furness
• It’s too big to email, therefore we must print (have offered a CD to them), though the data holds CEO numbers -> which are considered personal information: Bath & North Somerset
• You must be working for an organisation, who do you work for: Bassetlaw

2. We don’t have the data:

• In Northern Ireland, local authorities don’t enforce – it’s the responsibility of Roads Service (under Traffic Management (Northern Ireland) Order 2005)
• The police still do the enforcement.

3. We have passed it on to our technical team (likely to produce something – hopefully)

That is the story thusfar, I’ll be keeping tabs on the councils, keep track of my FOIs at What Do They Know.

[If you do reproduce anything coming out from my FOI requests, please attribute the request back to me - Neil Houston, a Help Me Investigate user]

The main issue with this was that the visualisation did not allow an easy scale or difference, as most countries in WE/EE etc are very similiar % wise.  The disparity comes when you compare Africa to North America and suchlike.

Therefore below, is a very quick visualisation of the spread of populations, by country that exist in the ‘urban environment’.  To do this, I turned the original spreadsheet (Percentage of global population living in cities) into a 3 column layout of, Country, Population % and Year (To Be Published Soon).

I used a vertical layout, descending by the most % to least, so we can see that places like Monaco are obviously nigh 100% whereas in Burundi, in 2030 it is predicted that less than 25% of the population will be in cities.

[more to come - it's late - bad point about this - tooooo much information]

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Through the Help Me Investigate site , I came across an investigation regarding parkingtickets, with the aim to find the most ticketed street in Birmingham in FY09. It sounded interesting, and I was delighted to see a FOI request from Heather Brooke (here it is on What Do They Know)

Data, it’s a rather ambiguous term. Anything can be seen as being a form of data, if you can ‘track’ it and put it in a spreadsheet then it sounds like data to me. The issue with data is that it can be rather hard to infer anything meaningful, especially if you are provided with a lot of data.

This is what happened with the data we were provided, it was in 3 separate excel files due the volume of tickets issued – a staggering 135,656 in a single year. To make it more manageable for everyone I consolidated the data into one single text file. So that the data could be ‘mined’ using a database, or in my case visualised. If you are interested the data is freely available.

The joy of data visualisation, is that you an instantly see and drill down into patterns, trend and other interesting items that you spot. This can make it easier and quicker to get some good solid numbers. You can see some graphs that I produced.

So what do we find? Of the 135,656 tickets issued between 1st April 
2008 – 31st March 2009, we can see that the most ticketed street in Birmingham was Alum Rock Rd, Washwood Heath (in Liam Byrne’s constituency) with 3,995 tickets.

That itself is a lot of tickets, but what is more surprising, is that if you take the 5th most ticketed spot (Alcester Road, Moseley) only 1,545 tickets were issued. Quite a difference.

The other interesting point on location, is that Livery Street Car Park (by Snowhill station) is the second most ticketed spot at 3,439. Yet this is a carpark, the majority of private sector carparks allow you to pay in full the amount required for your stay. Unfortunately Livery is a pay in advance, so if you get distracted shopping you are likely to be ticketed for overstaying.

One might expect that all staff are issuing tickets ‘fairly’ and in accordance with the rules. Though it’s surprising to see that the warden BM739, issued 5,080 tickets. The next ‘top’ ticketer issued 3,559. This shocked me, as that’s a LOT of extra tickets by BM739.

You can see the tweet I sent:

“Look out for parking enforcer BM739, top ticketer, mainly ladywood and city centre” :
1:11 PM Jul 13th

In general, we can see that the amount of tickets being issued over the year increased, month on month. Which suggests that either Birmingham parking wardens are being told to be more strict, that there are more wardens out and about or everyone is being told to be like BM739!

So that’s a quick run through what I found. I will be putting the data out in a form that will allow others to interact with it, and I’m also considering the value of seeing both the historic data held. As well as some additional fields, such as if the ticket was disputed. Do the tickets that BM739 issue get disputed the most?. Is there a particular parking infraction that is successfully appealed 80% of the time etc.

If you have any specific questions, add them as a comment, or email me on neil@rasga.co.uk. The software used to create the graphs, is available for a 15 day trial at http://www.tableausoftware.com/, the table is from Google Fusion (Birmingham Tickets Table), why not give it a go yourself?