Plymouth City Council's Data Play Day

Data Play Day 2
Check out our invite


 * Date: Friday 4th & Saturday 5th March
 * Time: 10am-4.30pm (Both days)
 * Where: Thrive Hub, Ocean Crescent, Plymouth, PL1 3FG
 * Register: Data Play 2 Eventbrite
 * Hashtag: #DataPlay
 * Blog: Data Play Blog
 * Datasets: PCC datasets page
 * Contact: GISplanning@plymouth.gov.uk

Come along for two days of playing with Plymouth data - get creative, network, be inspired, experiment and work with your idea and you could get £2,000 to develop it further!

Our Journey So Far
Data Play is an exciting new initiative led by Plymouth City Council Neighbourhood Planning Team to open up the Council’s data for the tech and creative industries to use. Creating apps, maps, games, installations, artworks and other ways to look at data helps everyone to explore the city in different ways. This is a win win opportunity – the Council improve the management of data and explore new ways to collect data, local companies and tech people benefit from having data to experiment with and local people have more easy access to data.

We have:


 * Established relationships with the digital community in the city and understanding what would attract them to get involved.
 * Agreed a process for opening our data and we have opened a small amount of data about the city.
 * Hosted a Data Play Day on 7 November that was attended by 30 people from a range of backgrounds and resulted in a host of great outcomes: Plymouth being built in Minecraft, interactive maps, an app for public toilets, the University GIS course using our data for lectures, exploring the use of counters and sensors on green spaces and a portal to make it easier to open our data. A short summary of the Data Play Day and outcomes is attached.
 * Hosted a young persons’ Data Play day with RIO where three secondary schools got together and played with our data – this resulted in a school using data to code a programme that suggests how safe each neighbourhood is drawing on a range of available data for example.
 * Data Play really well received by the local digital industry, other partners are looking at opening data (e.g Plymouth Community Homes, Plymouth Marine Laboratory) and is now opening opportunities for partnerships working and investment opportunities
 * A regular blog and are using #dataplay on Twitter.
 * Presented at the Smart City working group, an RSA evening about the smart agenda and are featured in Made In Plymouth
 * Secured an additional £60k from DCLG to develop Data Play specifically to support communities and Neighbourhood Forums

What Happens Next
The next Data Play Day is planned for 4 and 5 March where we are offering three £2,000 rewards to help further some of the best ideas. This will be decided on by a panel of local experts. Our next steps include::
 * Improvements to how we open data on-line
 * Identifying data that is particularly useful for neighbourhood Forums (including consultants reports) and seeing if we can open them
 * Piloting ways that data collected by Neighbourhood Forums and communities can be verified and used by PCC
 * Engaging ways to connect local communities with data about their area
 * Supporting Digital Plymouth with their conference
 * Improve the connection between the skills agenda and Data Play
 * Hosting another Play Day specifically on local community issues and ideas to connect VCS groups with digital expertise

Our Partners
Plymouth Community Homes, Plymouth University, i-DAT, Thinq Tanq, Real Ideas Organisations, Public Health, Plymouth College of Art, Delt, Dartmoor National Park, Devon County Council, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Plymouth Biological Association, PARC (CCTV cameras), Plymouth Culture Board and over 20 small local digital companies.